Charting the Landscape of Online Cryptocurrency Manipulation
This work charted the landscape of online cryptocurrency manipulation across multiple platforms, unveiling two different deception schemes – “pump-and-dump” and “Ponzi” – and identifying the channels involved in these frauds.
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies represent one of the most attractive markets for financial\nspeculation. As a consequence, they have attracted unprecedented attention on\nsocial media. Besides genuine discussions and legitimate investment\ninitiatives, several deceptive activities have flourished. In this work, we\nchart the online cryptocurrency landscape across multiple platforms. To reach\nour goal, we collected a large dataset, composed of more than 50M messages\npublished by almost 7M users on Twitter, Telegram and Discord, over three\nmonths. We performed bot detection on Twitter accounts sharing invite links to\nTelegram and Discord channels, and we discovered that more than 56% of them\nwere bots or suspended accounts. Then, we applied topic modeling techniques to\nTelegram and Discord messages, unveiling two different deception schemes -\n"pump-and-dump" and "Ponzi" - and identifying the channels involved in these\nfrauds. Whereas on Discord we found a negligible level of deception, on\nTelegram we retrieved 296 channels involved in pump-and-dump and 432 involved\nin Ponzi schemes, accounting for a striking 20% of the total. Moreover, we\nobserved that 93% of the invite links shared by Twitter bots point to Telegram\npump-and-dump channels, shedding light on a little-known social bot activity.\nCharting the landscape of online cryptocurrency manipulation can inform\nactionable policies to fight such abuse.\n