Ordekian, Marilyne;
Papasavva, Antonis;
Mariconti, Enrico;
Vasek, Marie;
(2024)
A Sinister Fattening: Dissecting the Tales of Pig Butchering and other Cryptocurrency Scams.
In:
Proceedings of the 2024 Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime 2024).
: Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
(In press).
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Abstract
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
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | A Sinister Fattening: Dissecting the Tales of Pig Butchering and other Cryptocurrency Scams |
| Event: | 2024 Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime 2024) |
| Location: | US |
| Dates: | 24 Sep 2024 - 26 Sep 2024 |
| Publisher version: | https://apwg.org/event/ecrime2024/ |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author-accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | cryptocurrency fraud, cybercrime measurement |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10197431 |
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