Abstract

Cryptocurrencies represent one of the most attractive markets for financial speculation. As a consequence, they have attracted unprecedented attention on social media. Besides genuine discussions and legitimate investment initiatives, several deceptive activities have flourished. In this work, we chart the online cryptocurrency landscape across multiple platforms. To reach our goal, we collected a large dataset, composed of more than 50M messages published by almost 7M users on Twitter, Telegram and Discord, over three months. We performed bot detection on Twitter accounts sharing invite links to Telegram and Discord channels, and we discovered that more than 56% of them were bots or suspended accounts. Then, we applied topic modeling techniques to Telegram and Discord messages, unveiling two different deception schemes - “pump-and-dump” and “Ponzi” - and identifying the channels involved in …

Date

2020

Authors

Leonardo Nizzoli, Serena Tardelli, Marco Avvenuti, Stefano Cresci, Maurizio Tesconi, Emilio Ferrara

Journal

IEEE Access

Volume

8

Pages

113230-113245