Understanding the Cryptocurrency Free Giveaway Scam Disseminated on Twitter Lists

Understand

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the cryptocurrency free giveaway scam disseminated in a new distribution channel, Twitter lists.

• To collect and detect the scam in this channel, unlike existing scam detection systems that rely on manual effort, this paper develops a fully automated scam detection system, \textit{GiveawayScamHunter}, to continuously collect lists from Twitter and utilize a Nature-Language-Processing (NLP) model to automatically detect the free giveaway scam and extract the scam cryptocurrency address.
• By running \textit{GiveawayScamHunter} from June 2022 to June 2023, we detected 95,111 free giveaway scam lists on Twitter that were created by thousands of Twitter accounts.
• Through analyzing the list creator accounts, our work reveals that scammers have combined different strategies to spread the scam, including compromising popular accounts and creating spam accounts on Twitter.