‘Follow the Money!’ $2 Billion of Crypto Scams Found on Ethereum | College of Computing
According to a new study, online criminals are scoring massive paydays – billions of dollars over the past seven years– by capitalizing on the public’s unfamiliarity with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
The discovery of $2 billion of illicit profits distributed across 91 digital wallets on the Ethereum blockchain was made by Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Mingxuan Yao and his faculty advisor, Associate Professor Brendan Saltaformaggio.
The pair spent six months reviewing millions of smart contract transactions and developed CoCo, an open-source tool capable of identifying fraud on Ethereum in real time.
Through their research Yao and Saltaformaggio found that smart contracts are being abused by anonymous cyber criminals at a much larger scale than previously known. Running a pool of 157 confirmed fraudulent contracts through Coco uncovered an additional unreported 1.2 million smart contracts.
The work was done in Georgia Tech’s Cyber Forensics Innovation (CyFI) Lab, a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and the School of Electrical and Computing Engineering (ECE). The lab specializes in digital forensic work and used its skills to investigate smart contract fraud on the prominent public cryptocurrency blockchain Ethereum.
