Fraud Detection in Cryptocurrency Networks—An Exploration Using Anomaly Detection and Heterogeneous Graph Transformers

Víctor Pérez-Cano and Francisco Jurado ()
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Víctor Pérez-Cano: Department of Computer Engineering, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain
Francisco Jurado: Department of Computer Engineering, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain

Future Internet, 2025, vol. 17, issue 1, 1-23

Abstract: Blockchains are the backbone behind cryptocurrency networks, which have developed rapidly in the last two decades. However, this growth has brought several challenges due to the features of these networks, specifically anonymity and decentralization. One of these challenges is the fight against fraudulent activities performed in these networks, which, among other things, involve financial schemes, phishing attacks or money laundering. This article will address the problem of identifying fraud cases among a large set of transactions extracted from the Bitcoin network. More specifically, our study’s goal was to find reliable techniques to label Bitcoin transactions, taking into account their features. The approach followed involved two kinds of Machine Learning methods. On the one hand, anomaly detection algorithms were applied to determine whether fraudulent activities tend to show anomalous behaviour without resorting to manually obtained labels. On the other hand, Heterogeneous Graph Transformers were used to leverage the heterogeneous relational nature of the cryptocurrency information. As a result, the article will provide reasonable conclusions to acknowledge that unsupervised approaches can be useful for fraud detection on blockchain networks. Furthermore, the effectiveness of supervised graph methods was revalidated, emphasizing the importance of data heterogeneity.

Keywords: blockchain; cryptocurrency; fraudulent activity detection; machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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