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Pump and Dumps in the Bitcoin Era: Real Time Detection of Cryptocurrency Market Manipulations

Author

Listed:
  • Massimo La Morgia
  • Alessandro Mei
  • Francesco Sassi
  • Julinda Stefa

Abstract

In the last years, cryptocurrencies are increasingly popular. Even people who are not experts have started to invest in these securities and nowadays cryptocurrency exchanges process transactions for over 100 billion US dollars per month. However, many cryptocurrencies have low liquidity and therefore they are highly prone to market manipulation schemes. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of pump and dump schemes organized by communities over the Internet. We observe how these communities are organized and how they carry out the fraud. Then, we report on two case studies related to pump and dump groups. Lastly, we introduce an approach to detect the fraud in real time that outperforms the current state of the art, so to help investors stay out of the market when a pump and dump scheme is in action.

Suggested Citation

  • Massimo La Morgia & Alessandro Mei & Francesco Sassi & Julinda Stefa, 2020. "Pump and Dumps in the Bitcoin Era: Real Time Detection of Cryptocurrency Market Manipulations," Papers 2005.06610, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2005.06610
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Khwaja, Asim Ijaz & Mian, Atif, 2005. "Unchecked intermediaries: Price manipulation in an emerging stock market," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(1), pages 203-241, October.
    2. Gandal, Neil & Hamrick, JT & Moore, Tyler & Oberman, Tali, 2018. "Price manipulation in the Bitcoin ecosystem," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 86-96.
    3. Albert S. Kyle & S. Viswanathan, 2008. "How to Define Illegal Price Manipulation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(2), pages 274-279, May.
    4. Jiang, Guolin & Mahoney, Paul G. & Mei, Jianping, 2005. "Market manipulation: A comprehensive study of stock pools," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(1), pages 147-170, July.
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    Cited by:

    1. Sihao Hu & Zhen Zhang & Shengliang Lu & Bingsheng He & Zhao Li, 2022. "Sequence-Based Target Coin Prediction for Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump," Papers 2204.12929, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2023.
    2. Dean Fantazzini & Yufeng Xiao, 2023. "Detecting Pump-and-Dumps with Crypto-Assets: Dealing with Imbalanced Datasets and Insiders’ Anticipated Purchases," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 11(3), pages 1-73, August.
    3. Mohammad Javad Rajaei & Qusay H. Mahmoud, 2023. "A Survey on Pump and Dump Detection in the Cryptocurrency Market Using Machine Learning," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 15(8), pages 1-17, August.
    4. David Ardia & Keven Bluteau, 2023. "The Role of Twitter in Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dumps," Papers 2306.02148, arXiv.org.

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