Charting the Landscape of Online Cryptocurrency Manipulation

Cryptocurrencies represent one of the most attractive markets for financial speculation. As~a consequence, they have attracted unprecedented attention on social media. Besides genuine discussions and legitimate investment initiatives, several deceptive activities have flourished. In~this work, we~chart the online cryptocurrency landscape across multiple platforms. To~reach our goal, we~collected a large dataset, composed of more than 50M messages published by almost 7M users on Twitter, Telegram and Discord, over three months. We~performed bot detection on Twitter accounts sharing invite links to Telegram and Discord channels, and we discovered that more than 56% of them were bots~or~suspended accounts. Then, we~applied topic modeling techniques to Telegram and Discord messages, unveiling two different deception schemes -- ``pump-and-dump'' and ``Ponzi'' -- and identifying the channels involved in these frauds. Whereas on Discord we found a negligible level of deception, on~Telegram we retrieved 296~channels involved in pump-and-dump and 432~involved in Ponzi schemes, accounting for a striking 20% of the total. Moreover, we~observed that 93% of the invite links shared by Twitter bots point to Telegram pump-and-dump channels, shedding light on a little-known social bot activity. Charting the landscape of online cryptocurrency manipulation can inform actionable policies to fight such abuse.