Abstract

Interest surrounding cryptocurrencies, digital or virtual currencies that are used as a medium for financial transactions, has grown tremendously in the recent years. The anonymity surrounding these currencies makes investors particularly susceptible to fraudity-such as “pump and dump” scams-where the goal is to artificially inflate the perceived worth of a currency, luring victims into investing before the fraudsters can sell their holdings. Because of the speed and relative anonymity offered by social platforms such as Twitter and Telegram, social media has become a preferred platform for scammers who wish to spread false hype about the cryptocurrency they are trying to pump. In this work, we propose and evaluate a computational approach that can automatically identify pump and dump scams as they unfold by combining information across social media platforms. We also develop a multi-modal approach for …

Date

March 5, 2021

Authors

Mehrnoosh Mirtaheri, Sami Abu-El-Haija, Fred Morstatter, Greg Ver Steeg, Aram Galstyan

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems

Volume

8

Issue

3

Pages

607-617

Publisher

IEEE