Less than 500 People Are Responsible for Trillions of Dollars of Artificial Crypto Trading (Pump-and-Dumps)

The paper "textsc{Perseus}: Tracing the Masterminds Behind Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes" unveils Perseus – a system designed to unmask the organizers of crypto pump-and-dump scams. Potentially fewer than 500 individuals are driving trillions in artificial trading.

Perseus combines real-time social media and market data, using "temporal attributed graphs" and Graph Neural Networks to trace the masterminds behind these manipulations.

Submitted on March 3, 2025, this study offers a breakthrough in identifying culprits, promising to protect investors and curb fraud in crypto, though the full scale of its impact is yet to be seen.