TY - JOUR
T1 - Across-Platform Detection of Malicious Cryptocurrency Accounts via Interaction Feature Learning
AU - Che, Zheng
AU - Shen, Meng
AU - Tan, Zhehui
AU - Du, Hanbiao
AU - Wang, Wei
AU - Chen, Ting
AU - Zhao, Qinglin
AU - Xie, Yong
AU - Zhu, Liehuang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2005-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - 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%.
AB - 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%.
KW - contrastive learning
KW - digital assets
KW - graph representation learning
KW - malicious account
KW - Web 3.0
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105004019547&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TIFS.2025.3565130
DO - 10.1109/TIFS.2025.3565130
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105004019547
SN - 1556-6013
VL - 20
SP - 4783
EP - 4798
JO - IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
JF - IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
ER -