Charting the Landscape of Online Cryptocurrency Manipulation
Open accessAbstract
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, several deceptive activities have flourished. In this work, we chart the online cryptocurrency landscape across multiple platforms. To reach our goal, we collected a large dataset, composed of more than 50M messages published by almost 7M users on Twitter, Telegram and Discord, over three months. We performed bot detection on Twitter accounts sharing invite links to Telegram and Discord channels, and we discovered that more than 56% of them were bots or suspended accounts. Then, we applied topic modeling techniques to Telegram and Discord messages, unveiling two different deception schemes - “pump-and-dump” and “Ponzi” - and identifying the channels involved in these frauds. Whereas on Discord we found a negligible level of deception, on Telegram we retrieved 296 channels involved in pump-and-dump and 432 involved in Ponzi schemes, accounting for a striking 20% of the total. Moreover, we observed that 93% of the invite links shared by Twitter bots point to Telegram pump-and-dump channels, shedding light on a little-known social bot activity. Charting the landscape of online cryptocurrency manipulation can inform actionable policies to fight such abuse.
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Bots are present in online cryptocurrency discussions and in the infodemics about the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Similar results were obtained about the presence of bots in online cryptocurrency discussions [24] and as part of the 'infodemics' about the COVID-19 pandemic [14].”
From A decade of social bot detection (2020) · cites this paper as [24]
Several group detectors implement graph-based approaches and aim at spotting suspicious account connectivity patterns.
“For instance, several group detectors implement graph-based approaches and aim at spotting suspicious account connectivity patterns [20, 24].”
From A decade of social bot detection (2020) · cites this paper as [24]
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References 72 · Cited by 132
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- J. Xu and B. Livshits, ''The anatomy of a cryptocurrency pump-and- dump scheme,'' in Proc. 28th USENIX Conf. Secur. Symp. (SEC), 2019, pp. 1609-1625.
- Authors
- Nizzoli, L., Tardelli, S., Avvenuti, M., Cresci, S., Tesconi, M., & Ferrara, E.
- Affiliations
- University of Pisa (IT)
- Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IT)
- University of Southern California (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- IEEE Access
- Published
- 2020
- Volume
- 8
- Pages
- 113230-113245
- ISSN
- 2169-3536 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3004034277
- Cited by
- 132
- References
- 72
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 31 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 6 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 17.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- IEEE Access (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- CINECA IRIS Institutial research information system (University of Pisa) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-17-1-0327)
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (W911NF-17-C-0094, D16AP00115)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- social bots, bot detection, pump-and-dump schemes, Ponzi schemes, cryptocurrency fraud, Telegram channels, Discord, Twitter, online financial fraud
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