Don't You Know, Pump it Up! Investigating Cryptocurrency Manipulation in Telegram-Driven Activity

A research paper from arXiv investigates the role of Telegram in cryptocurrency manipulation, specifically focusing on pump-and-dump schemes. The study highlights how Telegram is used for mass promotional activity (shilling) and proposes a scalable framework to analyze the interplay between information flows and market activity across public Telegram channels. This framework involves classifying crypto-related messages and detecting anomalous spikes in cryptocurrency mentions.

Why it matters

This research provides critical insights into the mechanisms and scale of cryptocurrency manipulation facilitated by communication platforms like Telegram. Understanding these tactics is essential for market integrity, investor protection, and the broader financial stability of the digital asset ecosystem. This directly impacts regulatory considerations and operational risk management.

Key insights

• Telegram plays a pivotal role in cryptocurrency communication and has been associated with coordinated manipulation schemes.
• Existing studies on cryptocurrency manipulation often focus on known manipulation chats or a limited set of cryptocurrencies.
• The research aims to understand how Telegram is leveraged for mass promotional activity (shilling) at scale, addressing limitations of previous work.
• A scalable framework is proposed to analyze the interplay between information flows and market activity across public Telegram channels.
• The framework includes classifying crypto-related messages using a fine-tuned encoder model to filter semantic noise.
• It also involves detecting anomalous spikes in cryptocurrency mentions via adaptive thresholding.

Source

arXiv — Computers and Society — https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01176