Related papers: Investigating MMM Ponzi scheme on Bitcoin
Job-based smishing scams, where victims are recruited under the guise of remote job opportunities, represent a rapidly growing and understudied threat within the broader landscape of online fraud. In this paper, we present Anansi, the first…
With the popularity of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), NFTs have become a new target of phishing attacks, posing a significant threat to the NFT trading ecosystem. There has been growing anecdotal evidence that new means of NFT phishing attacks…
Ransomware operations have evolved from relatively unsophisticated threat actors into highly coordinated cybercrime syndicates that regularly extort millions of dollars in a single attack. Despite dominating headlines and crippling…
An open distributed system can be secured by requiring participants to present proof of work and rewarding them for participation. The Bitcoin digital currency introduced this mechanism, which is adopted by almost all contemporary digital…
This paper presents a case study of a cryptocurrency scam that utilized coordinated and inauthentic behavior on Twitter. In 2020, 143 accounts sold by an underground merchant were used to orchestrate a fake giveaway. Tweets pointing to a…
The explosive growth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Web3 has created a new frontier for digital art and collectibles, but also an emerging space for fraudulent activities. This study provides an in-depth analysis of NFT rug pulls, which…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native (and non-) tokens among participants. The complete historical bookkeeping and its wide availability opens up an unprecedented possibility, i.e. that of understanding…
Every year, criminals launder billions of dollars acquired from serious felonies (e.g., terrorism, drug smuggling, or human trafficking) harming countless people and economies. Cryptocurrencies, in particular, have developed as a haven for…
We use the database leak of Mt. Gox exchange to analyze the dynamics of the price of bitcoin from June 2011 to November 2013. This gives us a rare opportunity to study an emerging retail-focused, highly speculative and unregulated market…
Cryptocurrency abuse reporting services are a valuable data source about abusive blockchain addresses, prevalent types of cryptocurrency abuse, and their financial impact on victims. However, they may suffer data pollution due to their…
Since the inception of permissionless blockchains with Bitcoin in 2008, it became apparent that their most well-suited use case is related to making the financial system and its advantages available to everyone seamlessly without depending…
Over the past few years, there has been a growth in activity, public knowledge, and awareness of cryptocurrencies and related blockchain technology. As the industry has grown, there has also been an increase in scams looking to steal…
We present in this paper a cryptocurrency called Mobile Fungible Token (MFT) or "MiftyCoin", which is mined with Proof of Human Work (PoH). Blocks in MFT's blockchain are mined by users solving unique 24-tile puzzles autogenerated as a…
The Bitcoin network is burning a large amount of energy for mining. In this paper we estimate the lower bound for the global energy cost for a period of ten years from 2010, taking into account changing oil costs, improvements in hashing…
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols…
Selfish Mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols [3] and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin [4, 10] and similar linear chain protocols…
We review the so called selfish mining strategy in the Bitcoin network and compare its profitability to honest mining.We build a rigorous profitability model for repetition games. The time analysis of the attack has been ignored in the…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
Mining attacks enable an adversary to procure a disproportionately large portion of mining rewards by deviating from honest mining practices within the PoW-based blockchain system. In this paper, we demonstrate that the security…
Cryptocurrencies are rapidly expanding and becoming vital in digital financial markets. However, the rise in cryptocurrency-related illicit activities has led to significant losses for users. To protect the security of these platforms, it…