Detecting Ethereum Phishing Scams with Temporal Motif Features of Subgraph

Abstract

In recent years, Ethereum has become a hotspot for criminal activities such as phishing scams that seriously compromise Ethereum transaction security. However, existing methods cannot accurately model Ethereum transaction data and make full use of the temporal structure information and basic account features. In this paper, we propose an Ethereum phishing detection framework based on temporal motif features. By designing a sampling method, we convert labeled Ethereum addresses into multi-directed transaction subgraphs with time and amount to avoid losing structure and attribute information. To learn representations for subgraphs, we define and extract the temporal motif features and general transaction features. Extensive experiments on Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and XGBoost demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms all baselines and provides an effective phishing scams detection for Ethereum.