“Get a higher return on your savings!”: Comparing adverts for cryptocurrency investment scams across platforms

Abstract

This work compares machine learning methods using supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning, to classify advertisements for cryptocurrency related investment scams found in the online forum Bitcointalk, and the social media platform Reddit. We extract more than 24.2 million posts from Bitcointalk and use Reddit's API to collect 2,108 submissions. We train and compare several multiclass text classification approaches and use the models with highest accuracy and F-measure to identify cryptocurrency investment scam advertisements found on both platforms. We discover around five percent of all posts collected on both sites are potential scams. We then use another text classifier to identify the scam actors involved in these investment scam advertisements. We also discover the lures used within these fraudulent adverts and find the main differences in luring techniques used between Bitcointalk and Reddit. We identify that the most prevalent lure type uses the financial principle, followed by the distraction principle in Bitcointalk, and by the authority principle in Reddit. Finally, we use subreddits as communities' proxies and compare scam advertisements within them to identify whether pensioners are being specifically targeted by cryptocurrency scam adverts. Our results show that retirement subreddits do not contain a higher number of cryptocurrency investment scam adverts compared to other investment focused subreddits.