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Social media platforms have become the hubs for various user interactions covering a wide range of needs, including technical support and services related to brands, products, or user accounts. Unfortunately, there has been a recent surge…
Donations to charity-based crowdfunding environments have been on the rise in the last few years. Unsurprisingly, deception and fraud in such platforms have also increased, but have not been thoroughly studied to understand what…
There has been a rise in online platforms facilitating the buying and selling of social media accounts. While the trade of social media profiles is not inherently illegal, social media platforms view such transactions as violations of their…
As the indispensable trading platforms of the ecosystem, hundreds of cryptocurrency exchanges are emerging to facilitate the trading of digital assets. While, it also attracts the attentions of attackers. A number of scam attacks were…
The rapid growth in popularity and hype surrounding digital assets such as art, video, and music in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has made them a lucrative investment opportunity, with NFT-based sales surpassing $25B in 2021 alone.…
Interest surrounding cryptocurrencies, digital or virtual currencies that are used as a medium for financial transactions, has grown tremendously in recent years. The anonymity surrounding these currencies makes investors particularly…
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…
Online Social Networks (OSNs) witness a rise in user activity whenever an event takes place. Malicious entities exploit this spur in user-engagement levels to spread malicious content that compromises system reputation and degrades user…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the cryptocurrency free giveaway scam disseminated in a new distribution channel, Twitter lists. To collect and detect the scam in this channel, unlike existing scam detection systems that…
The issue of quantifying and characterizing various forms of social media manipulation and abuse has been at the forefront of the computational social science research community for over a decade. In this paper, I provide a…
Compromising social network accounts has become a profitable course of action for cybercriminals. By hijacking control of a popular media or business account, attackers can distribute their malicious messages or disseminate fake information…
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 mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies has led to a surge in wallet-related issues reported by ordinary users on social media platforms. In parallel, there is an increase in an emerging fraud trend called cryptocurrency-based technical…
YouTube has become the second most popular website according to Alexa, and it represents an enticing platform for scammers to attract victims. Because of the computational difficulty of classifying multimedia, identifying scams on YouTube…
Social media have been growing rapidly and become essential elements of many people's lives. Meanwhile, social media have also come to be a popular source for identity deception. Many social media identity deception cases have arisen over…
The dark web has emerged as the state-of-the-art solution for enhanced anonymity. Just like a double-edged sword, it also inadvertently becomes the safety net and breeding ground for illicit activities. Among them, cryptocurrencies have…
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,…
Cryptocurrencies represent one of the most attractive markets for financial speculation. As a consequence, they have attracted unprecedented attention on social media. Besides genuine discussions and legitimate investment initiatives,…
Phishing attacks are an increasingly potent web-based threat, with nearly 1.5 million websites created on a monthly basis. In this work, we present the first study towards identifying such attacks through phishing reports shared by users on…
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…