Cited by 51Spam and Phishing DetectionCybercrime and Law Enforcement StudiesBlockchain Technology Applications and Security

Spams meet Cryptocurrencies: Sextortion in the Bitcoin Ecosystem

Paquet-Clouston, Masarah, Romiti, Matteo, Haslhofer, Bernhard, Charvat, Thomas·2019·Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies

Abstract

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 of the spamming industry. Using a dataset of 4,340,736 sextortion spams, this research aims at understanding such new amalgamation by uncovering spammers' operations. To do so, a simple, yet effective method for projecting Bitcoin addresses mentioned in sextortion spams onto transaction graph abstractions is computed over the entire Bitcoin blockchain. This allows us to track and investigate monetary flows between involved actors and gain insights into the financial structure of sextortion campaigns. We find that sextortion spammers are somewhat sophisticated, following pricing strategies and benefiting from cost reductions as their operations cut the upper-tail of the spamming supply chain. We discover that one single entity is likely controlling the financial backbone of the majority of the sextortion campaigns and that the 11-month operation studied yielded a lower-bound revenue between $1,300,620 and $1,352,266. We conclude that sextortion spamming is a lucrative business and spammers will likely continue to send bulk emails that try to extort money through cryptocurrencies.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3318041.3355466

Cites

24 of 24 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Paquet-Clouston et al. (2019) found that spammers amassed earnings between $1,300,620 and $1,352,266 (USD) in Bitcoin over an 11-month period, averaging a monthly revenue of $122,933 (USD).

    “their examination of sextortion spam campaigns and their financial outcomes revealed that spammers amassed earnings between $1,300,620 and $1,352,266 (USD) in Bitcoin over an 11-month period, averaging a monthly revenue of $122,933 (USD).”

    From Sextortion: A Scoping Review (2025) · cites this paper as Paquet-Clouston et al., 2019

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

3 of the 27 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Paquet-Clouston, M., Romiti, M., Haslhofer, B., & Charvat, T.
Affiliations
  • GoSecure
  • AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH (AT)
  • Excello
Venue
Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies
Publisher
ACM
Published
2019-10-21
Pages
76-88
OpenAlex
W2981756928
Cited by
51
References
27
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 5
FWCI
3.98
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT) (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (TITANIUM (No. 740558))
  • Austrian FFG?s KIRAS programme (VIRTCRIME (No. 860672))
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Keywords
sextortion, spam, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Bitcoin addresses, transaction graphs, blockchain analysis, pricing strategy, revenue forecasting

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review