Skip to main content

Detecting Illicit Ethereum Accounts Based on Their Transaction History and Properties and Using Machine Learning

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
The International Conference on Deep Learning, Big Data and Blockchain (DBB 2022) (DBB 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 541))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 379 Accesses

Abstract

The Ethereum blockchain has been subject to an increasing fraudulent activity during the recent years that hinders its democratization. To detect fraudulent accounts, previous works have exploited supervised machine learning algorithms. We can identify two main approaches. The first approach consists in representing transaction records as a graph in order to apply node embedding algorithms. The second approach consists in calculating statistics based on the amount and time of transactions realized. The former approach leads to better results at this day. However, transactional data approaches - based on time and data only - are not used to their full potential. This paper adopts a transactional data approach by expanding feature calculation to every transaction properties. We study three classification models: XGBoost, SVM Classifier and Logistic Regression and operate a feature selection protocol to highlight the most significant features. Our model results in a 26 features dataset providing an f-score of 0.9654.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    coinmarketcap.com.

  2. 2.

    investopedia.com.

  3. 3.

    statista.com.

  4. 4.

    theblockcrypto.com.

  5. 5.

    forbes.com.

  6. 6.

    europarl.com (European Parliament).

  7. 7.

    legifrance.com (French Legislation).

  8. 8.

    github.com/etherscamdb.

  9. 9.

    ICOs.

  10. 10.

    github.com/EtherScamDB.

  11. 11.

    cointelegraph.com.

  12. 12.

    dune.xyz.

  13. 13.

    bigquery.

  14. 14.

    scikit-learn.org.

References

  1. Chen, W., et al.: Phishing scam detection on Ethereum: towards financial security for blockchain ecosystem. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Conference on International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 4506–4512 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Farrugia, S., Ellul, J., Azzopardi, G.: Detection of illicit accounts over the Ethereum blockchain. Expert Syst. Appl. 150, 113318 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Greene, M.N., et al.: Divided we fall: fighting payments fraud together. Econ. Perspect. 33(1), 37–42 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Hilal, W., Gadsden, S.A., Yawney, J.: Financial fraud: a review of anomaly detection techniques and recent advances. In: Expert Systems with Applications (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Hossin, M., Sulaiman, M.N.: A review on evaluation metrics for data classification evaluations. Int. J. Data Min. Knowl. Manage. Process 5(2), 1 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Jung, E., Le Tilly, M., Gehani, A., Ge, Y.: Data mining-based Ethereum fraud detection. In: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain), pp. 266–273. IEEE (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Kim, Y., Kogan, A.: Development of an anomaly detection model for a bank’s transitory account system. J. Inf. Syst. 28(1), 145–165 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lasas, K., et al.: Fraudulent behaviour identification in Ethereum blockchain (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Decentralized Bus. Rev. 21260 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Perols, J.: Financial statement fraud detection: an analysis of statistical and machine learning algorithms. Auditing: J. Pract. Theor. 30(2), 19–50 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Wang, J., Chen, P., Yu, S., Xuan, Q.: TSGN: transaction subgraph networks for identifying Ethereum phishing accounts. In: Dai, H.-N., Liu, X., Luo, D.X., Xiao, J., Chen, X. (eds.) BlockSys 2021. CCIS, vol. 1490, pp. 187–200. Springer, Singapore (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7993-3_15

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Wu, J., et al.: Who are the phishers? Phishing scam detection on Ethereum via network embedding. In: IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Ying, Z., et al.: Hierarchical graph representation learning with differentiable pooling. In: arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.08804 (2018)

  14. Yuan, Q., et al.: Detecting phishing scams on Ethereum based on transaction records (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Zheng, Z., et al.: Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey (2016)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amel Bella Baci .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Bella Baci, A., Brousmiche, K., Amal, I., Abdelhédi, F., Rigaud, L. (2023). Detecting Illicit Ethereum Accounts Based on Their Transaction History and Properties and Using Machine Learning. In: Awan, I., Younas, M., Bentahar, J., Benbernou, S. (eds) The International Conference on Deep Learning, Big Data and Blockchain (DBB 2022). DBB 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 541. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16035-6_8

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics