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The mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies has led to a surge inwallet-related issues reported by ordinary users on social media platforms. Inparallel, there is an increase in an emerging fraud trend calledcryptocurrency-based technical support scam, in which fraudsters offer fakewallet recovery services and target users experiencing wallet-related issues.  In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of cryptocurrency-basedtechnical support scams. We present an analysis apparatus called HoneyTweet toanalyze this kind of scam. Through HoneyTweet, we lure over 9K scammers byposting 25K fake wallet support tweets (so-called honey tweets). We then deployautomated systems to interact with scammers to analyze their modus operandi. Inour experiments, we observe that scammers use Twitter as a starting point forthe scam, after which they pivot to other communication channels (eg email,Instagram, or Telegram) to complete the fraud activity. We track scammersacross those communication channels and bait them into revealing their paymentmethods. Based on the modes of payment, we uncover two categories of scammersthat either request secret key phrase submissions from their victims or directpayments to their digital wallets. Furthermore, we obtain scam confirmation bydeploying honey wallet addresses and validating private key theft. We alsocollaborate with the prominent payment service provider by sharing scammer datacollections. The payment service provider feedback was consistent with ourfindings, thereby supporting our methodology and results. By consolidating ouranalysis across various vantage points, we provide an end-to-end scam lifecycleanalysis and propose recommendations for scam mitigation.

Conning the Crypto Conman: End-to-End Analysis of Cryptocurrency-based Technical Support Scams