Pump and Dumps in the Bitcoin Era: Real Time Detection of Cryptocurrency Market Manipulations
This addresses the risk of financial losses for cryptocurrency investors, particularly in low-liquidity markets, by providing a tool to avoid manipulation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing detection methods.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting cryptocurrency market manipulation schemes known as pump and dumps, analyzing community-organized fraud and introducing a real-time detection approach that outperforms the current state of the art.
In the last years, cryptocurrencies are increasingly popular. Even people who are not experts have started to invest in these securities and nowadays cryptocurrency exchanges process transactions for over 100 billion US dollars per month. However, many cryptocurrencies have low liquidity and therefore they are highly prone to market manipulation schemes. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of pump and dump schemes organized by communities over the Internet. We observe how these communities are organized and how they carry out the fraud. Then, we report on two case studies related to pump and dump groups. Lastly, we introduce an approach to detect the fraud in real time that outperforms the current state of the art, so to help investors stay out of the market when a pump and dump scheme is in action.