Across-Platform Detection of Malicious Cryptocurrency Accounts via Interaction Feature Learning

Zheng Che, Meng Shen*, Zhehui Tan, Hanbiao Du, Wei Wang, Ting Chen, Qinglin Zhao, Yong Xie, Liehuang Zhu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

With the rapid evolution of Web3.0, cryptocurrency has become a cornerstone of decentralized finance. While these digital assets enable efficient and borderless financial transactions, their pseudonymous nature has also attracted malicious activities such as money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes. Effective detection of malicious accounts is crucial to maintaining the security and integrity of the Web 3.0 ecosystem. Existing malicious account detection methods rely on large amounts of labeled data and suffer from low generalization. Label-efficient and generalizable malicious account detection remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose ShadowEyes, a framework for detecting malicious accounts by leveraging interaction feature learning with only a small labeled dataset. Specifically, We first propose a generalized account representation named TxGraph, which captures the universal interaction features of Ethereum and Bitcoin. Then we carefully design an account representation augmentation method tailored to simulate the evolution of malicious accounts to generate positive pairs. We conduct extensive experiments using public datasets to evaluate the performance of ShadowEyes. The results demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in four typical scenarios. Specifically, in the scenario of across-platform malicious account detection, ShadowEyes maintains an F1 score of around 90%, which is 10% higher than the SOTA method. In the zero-shot learning scenario, it can achieve an F1 score of 79.56% for detecting gambling accounts, surpassing the SOTA method by 10.44%.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4783-4798
Number of pages16
JournalIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Volume20
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2025
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • contrastive learning
  • digital assets
  • graph representation learning
  • malicious account
  • Web 3.0

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