Abstract
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.
Highlights
Cryptocurrencies have attracted considerable public attention over the years, carving out a significant social presence in online environments
Social media have already proven to be a suitable habitat for deception in many domains, such as politics and healthcare, and the cryptocurrency market is no exception [5]
We focused on the Twitter microblogging platform, and on the two instant messaging platforms Telegram and Discord
Summary
Cryptocurrencies have attracted considerable public attention over the years, carving out a significant social presence in online environments. Nizzoli et al.: Charting the Landscape of Online Cryptocurrency Manipulation of new investors is not large enough to sustain the process, the chain breaks, and last comers lose their investment [10] Such works addressed each fraud in a targeted way. This work aims to map and assess the extent of cryptocurrency manipulations within and across the online ecosystems of Twitter, Telegram, and Discord Such wide, horizontal exploration is of the utmost importance to have a broad overview of the crypto environment and the actors involved. Telegram and Discord are the ideal habitats for crypto scams to proliferate, as they offer anonymity and low levels of moderation They feature channels as a way to broadcast public messages to a large audience and to invite investors to join.
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