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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…
Bitcoin is by far the most popular crypto-currency solution enabling peer-to-peer payments. Despite some studies highlighting the network does not provide full anonymity, it is still being heavily used for a wide variety of dubious…
Blockchain provides the unique and accountable channel for financial forensics by mining its open and immutable transaction data. A recent surge has been witnessed by training machine learning models with cryptocurrency transaction data for…
The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for adoption as technology platforms for cryptocurrencies. However, such adoption has enabled cybercriminals to…
Anti-money laundering (AML) regulations play a critical role in safeguarding financial systems, but bear high costs for institutions and drive financial exclusion for those on the socioeconomic and international margins. The advent of…
The use of cryptocurrencies has led to an increase in illicit activities such as money laundering, with traditional rule-based approaches becoming less effective in detecting and preventing such activities. In this paper, we propose a novel…
Money laundering has become one of the most relevant criminal activities in modern societies, as it causes massive financial losses for governments, banks and other institutions. Detecting such activities is among the top priorities when it…
Blockchain technology, with implications in the financial domain, offers data in the form of large-scale transaction networks. Analyzing transaction networks facilitates fraud detection, market analysis, and supports government regulation.…
The number of blockchain users has tremendously grown in recent years. As an unintended consequence, e-crime transactions on blockchains has been on the rise. Consequently, public blockchains have become a hotbed of research for developing…
The dramatic adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the USA has revolutionized the financial landscape and provided unprecedented investment and transaction efficiency opportunities. The prime objective of this research project…
The problem of anomaly detection has been studied for a long time. In short, anomalies are abnormal or unlikely things. In financial networks, thieves and illegal activities are often anomalous in nature. Members of a network want to detect…
Detecting illicit nodes on blockchain networks is a valuable task for strengthening future regulation. Recent machine learning-based methods proposed to tackle the tasks are using some blockchain transaction datasets with a small portion of…
Criminals have become increasingly experienced in using cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, for money laundering. The use of cryptocurrencies can hide criminal identities and transfer hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty funds through…
The problem of anomaly detection has been studied for a long time, and many Network Analysis techniques have been proposed as solutions. Although some results appear to be quite promising, no method is clearly to be superior to the rest. In…
Since the creation of Bitcoin, transaction tracking is one of the prominent means for following the movement of Bitcoins involved in illegal activities. Although every Bitcoin transaction is recorded in the blockchain database, which is…
Cryptocurrencies are considered relevant assets and they are currently used as an investment or to carry out transactions. However, specific characteristics commonly associated with the cryptocurrencies such as irreversibility,…
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that features a distributed, decentralized and trustworthy mechanism, which has made Bitcoin a popular global transaction platform. The transaction efficiency among nations and the privacy benefiting from address…
In shaping the Internet of Money, the application of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) to the financial sector triggered regulatory concerns. Notably, while the user anonymity enabled in this field may safeguard privacy…
Money launderers take advantage of limitations in existing detection approaches by hiding their financial footprints in a deceitful manner. They manage this by replicating transaction patterns that the monitoring systems cannot easily…
In this brief, we conduct a complex-network analysis of the Bitcoin transaction network. In particular, we design a new sampling method, namely random walk with flying-back (RWFB), to conduct effective data sampling. We then conduct a…