Understanding the Cryptocurrency Free Giveaway Scam Disseminated on Twitter Lists

This paper presents an end-to-end analysis of the cryptocurrency free giveaway scam disseminated in a new distribution channel, Twitter lists. To detect scams disseminated in this channel, unlike existing detection systems that rely on manual effort, this paper develops a fully automated detection system, GiveawayScamHunter, which can continuously collect lists from Twitter and utilize a Nature-Language-Processing (NLP) model to automatically detect the free giveaway scam and then extract the associated scam cryptocurrency address.By running GiveawayScamHunter from Jun. 2022 to Jun. 2023, we have collected 95,111 free giveaway scam Twitter lists created by thousands of Twitter accounts. Through analyzing the profile of scam list creators, our work reveals that different strategies have been adopted to spread the scam scheme, including compromising popular accounts and registering spam accounts on Twitter. Our analysis result shows that 43.9% of spam accounts remained active before our report. Furthermore, we collected 327 free giveaway domains and 121 new scam cryptocurrency addresses. By tracing the transaction history of all scam addresses, our work uncovers that over 365 victims have been attacked by the scam, resulting in an estimated financial loss of 872K USD. Overall, our work sheds light on the tactics, scale, and impact of free giveaway scams disseminated on Twitter lists, emphasizing the urgent need for effective detection and prevention mechanisms to protect social network users from such fraudulent activity.