%0 Generic
%A Ordekian, Marilyne
%A Papasavva, Antonis
%A Mariconti, Enrico
%A Vasek, Marie
%C Boston, Massachusetts, USA
%D 2024
%F discovery:10197431
%K cryptocurrency fraud, cybercrime measurement
%T A Sinister Fattening: Dissecting the Tales of Pig Butchering and other Cryptocurrency Scams
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10197431/
%V 2024
%X Cryptocurrency scams have risen in popularity with  the mainstreaming of cryptocurrencies. People can fall victim  to them because of their lack of knowledge, particularly when  they gain a sense of trust in the ecosystem via a scammer.  In this paper, we analyze 143 cryptocurrency scams across 11  different types mined from 133 scam narratives collated by  the government of California. Most of these are pig-butchering  scams (101) where attackers interact with their victims, gain  their trust, and introduce them to a (scam) cryptocurrency  investment opportunity. These scams vary in lure which indicates  the wide variety of scams in our sample. Scammers often portray  themselves as the gender opposite their target; our results show  greater financial gains using this approach. Furthermore, most  scams end up communicating via messaging apps, regardless  of how the scammer initially reached out to the victim. These  cross platform movements indicate a leap of faith and trust in  the scammer needed to scam the victim. While many of these  scams involved a fake cryptocurrency trading platform (124), we  find 33 scams involving well known cryptocurrency exchanges,  highlighting the need for legitimate cryptocurrency platforms to  protect their (overwhelmingly new) users from these scams
%Z This version is the author-accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.