Identification of High Yielding Investment Programs in Bitcoin via Transactions Pattern Analysis

Abstract

Although Bitcoin is one of the most successful decentralized cryptocurrency, recent research has revealed that it can be used as fraudulent activities such as HYIP (High Yield Investment Program). To identify such undesired activities, it is important to obtain Bitcoin addresses related with fraud. So far, the identification of such activities is based upon relating Bitcoin addresses with graph mining procedures. In this paper, we follow a different approach for identifying Bitcoin addresses related with HYIP by analyzing transactions patterns. In particular, based on the individual inspection of HYIP activity in Bitcoin, we propose a number of features that can be extracted from transactions. In particular, a signed integer called pattern is assigned to each transaction and the frequency of each pattern is calculated as key features. By evaluating the classification performance with more than 1,500 labeled Bitcoin addresses, it is shown that about 83% of HYIP addresses are correctly classified while maintaining false positive rate less than 4.4%.