Related papers: Serial Scammers and Attack of the Clones: How Scam…
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…
Spectral clustering is a widely used algorithm to find clusters in networks. Several researchers have studied the stability of spectral clustering under local differential privacy with the additional assumption that the underlying networks…
The Uniswap is a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) protocol that facilitates automatic token exchange without the need for traditional order books. Every pair of tokens forms a liquidity pool on Uniswap, and each token can be paired with any…
For different factors/reasons, ranging from inherent characteristics and features providing decentralization, enhanced privacy, ease of transactions, etc., to implied external hardships in enforcing regulations, contradictions in data…
Law enforcement agencies are confronted with a rapidly growing number of cryptoasset-related cases, often redundantly investigating the same cases without mutual knowledge or shared insights. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that…
A recent spam wave of IP addresses in the Bitcoin P2P network allowed us to estimate the degree distribution of reachable peers in the network. The resulting distribution shows that about every second reachable peer runs with Bitcoin Core's…
In traditional banking, repeated deposit-and-lend cycles let a single dollar of reserves support multiple dollars of claims. Decentralized finance produces an analogous structure with tokens. Constructing a Token Graph of 10,200 tokens…
We explore the adoption of graph representation learning (GRL) algorithms to investigate similarities across services offered by Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. Following existing literature, we use Ethereum transaction data to…
Phone scams remain a difficult problem to tackle due to the combination of protocol limitations, legal enforcement challenges and advances in technology enabling attackers to hide their identities and reduce costs. Scammers use social…
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…
Bitcoin cryptocurrency system enables users to transact securely and pseudo-anonymously by using an arbitrary number of aliases (Bitcoin addresses). Cybercriminals exploit these characteristics to commit immutable and presumably untraceable…
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…
Correlation clustering is a central topic in unsupervised learning, with many applications in ML and data mining. In correlation clustering, one receives as input a signed graph and the goal is to partition it to minimize the number of…
Money laundering is not only about moving illicit funds, but about hiding the money's origin and traces to complicate detection. Financial criminals resort to many methods to avoid regulators and legal thresholds. But analysts investigating…
This paper studies pipelined algorithms for protecting distributed grid computations from cheating participants, who wish to be rewarded for tasks they receive but don't perform. We present improved cheater detection algorithms that utilize…
In this paper, we formulate the design of efficient digitalised deposit return schemes as a control problem. We focus on the recycling of paper cups, though the proposed methodology applies more broadly to reverse logistics systems arising…
With the development of high technology, the scope of fraud is increasing, resulting in annual losses of billions of dollars worldwide. The preventive protection measures become obsolete and vulnerable over time, so effective detective…
Blockchain technology has been successfully exploited for deploying new economic applications. However, it has started arousing the interest of malicious actors who deliver scams to deceive honest users and to gain economic advantages.…
We study the economics of transaction reverts on Ethereum rollups and show that they are not accidental failures but equilibrium outcomes of MEV strategies. Using execution traces from major L2s, we find that over 80% of reverted…
An efficient MCMC algorithm is presented to cluster the nodes of a network such that nodes with similar role in the network are clustered together. This is known as block-modelling or block-clustering. The model is the stochastic blockmodel…