%O This version is the author-accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
%T A Sinister Fattening: Dissecting the Tales of Pig Butchering and other Cryptocurrency Scams
%L discovery10197431
%D 2024
%C Boston, Massachusetts, USA
%S Symposium on Electronic Crime Research
%K cryptocurrency fraud, cybercrime measurement
%V 2024
%A Marilyne Ordekian
%A Antonis Papasavva
%A Enrico Mariconti
%A Marie Vasek
%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
%B Proceedings of the 2024 Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime 2024)