Related papers: Towards Understanding and Characterizing the Arbit…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) markets spread across Layer-1 (L1) and Layer-2 (L2) blockchains rely on arbitrage to keep prices aligned. Today most price gaps are closed against centralized exchanges (CEXes), whose deep liquidity and fast…
The prosperity of the cryptocurrency ecosystem drives the need for digital asset trading platforms. Beyond centralized exchanges (CEXs), decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are introduced to allow users to trade cryptocurrency without…
Phishing is a widespread scam activity on Ethereum, causing huge financial losses to victims. Most existing phishing scam detection methods abstract accounts on Ethereum as nodes and transactions as edges, then use manual statistics of…
Telegram, initially a messaging app, has evolved into a platform where users can interact with various services through programmable applications, bots. Bots provide a wide range of uses, from moderating groups, helping with online…
We mine the leaked history of trades on Mt. Gox, the dominant Bitcoin exchange from 2011 to early 2014, to detect the triangular arbitrage activity conducted within the platform. The availability of user identifiers per trade allows us to…
Fraud across the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is growing, with victims losing billions to DeFi scams every year. However, there is a disconnect between the reported value of these scams and associated legal prosecutions. We use…
In recent years, a more advanced form of phishing has arisen on Ethereum, surpassing early-stage, simple transaction phishing. This new form, which we refer to as payload-based transaction phishing (PTXPHISH), manipulates smart contract…
This paper provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of the economics and dynamics behind arbitrages between centralized and decentralized exchanges (CEX-DEX) on Ethereum. We refine heuristics to identify arbitrage transactions from…
In the past year, a new spamming scheme has emerged: sexual extortion messages requiring payments in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, also known as sextortion. This scheme represents a first integration of the use of cryptocurrencies by members…
As COVID-19 has been spreading across the world since early 2020, a growing number of malicious campaigns are capitalizing the topic of COVID-19. COVID-19 themed cryptocurrency scams are increasingly popular during the pandemic. However,…
The use of blockchains for automated and adversarial trading has become commonplace. However, due to the transparent nature of blockchains, an adversary is able to observe any pending, not-yet-mined transactions, along with their execution…
While quantitative automation related to trading crypto-assets such as ERC-20 tokens has become relatively commonplace, with services such as 3Commas and Shrimpy offering user-friendly web-driven services for even the average crypto trader,…
Applications of blockchain technologies got a lot of attention in recent years. They exceed beyond exchanging value and being a substitute for fiat money and traditional banking system. Nevertheless, being able to exchange value on a…
This paper investigates the cryptocurrency giveaway scam with the YouTube live stream carried out on 5/15/2022 and 5/16/2022. In this scam scheme, the scammer plays a recorded video of a famous person in a YouTube live stream annotated with…
With the widespread use of social media, organizations, and individuals use these platforms to raise funds and support causes. Unfortunately, this has led to the rise of scammers in soliciting fraudulent donations. In this study, we conduct…
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…
Scam contracts on Ethereum have rapidly evolved alongside the rise of DeFi and NFT ecosystems, utilizing increasingly complex code obfuscation techniques to avoid early detection. This paper systematically investigates how obfuscation…
Telegram has emerged as a major platform for large-scale video piracy, where copyrighted content is rapidly distributed among users. Despite its prominence, the structural and operational dynamics of this ecosystem remain insufficiently…
Scams -- fraudulent schemes designed to swindle money from victims -- have existed for as long as recorded history. However, the Internet's combination of low communication cost, global reach, and functional anonymity has allowed scam…
Cross-chain bridges are a type of middleware for blockchain interoperability that supports the transfer of assets and data across blockchains. However, several of these bridges have vulnerabilities that have caused 3.2 billion dollars in…