Characterizing and Detecting Money Laundering Activities on the Bitcoin Network

Understand

Bitcoin is by far the most popular crypto-currency solution enabling peer-to-peer payments.

• Despite some studies highlighting the network does not provide full anonymity, it is still being heavily used for a wide variety of dubious financial activities such as money laundering, ponzi schemes, and ransom-ware payments.
• In this paper, we explore the landscape of potential money laundering activities occurring across the Bitcoin network.
• Using data collected over three years, we create transaction graphs and provide an in-depth analysis on various graph characteristics to differentiate money laundering transactions from regular transactions.