Fake it 'Til you Make it? Supervised Machine Learning Approach to Detect Bots on Web3 Airdrops

Abstract

Web3 airdrops have become a popular way to distribute tokens and raise project awareness, but their objective is frequently abused by bot activities. For example, the 2024 Hamster Kombat project reported detecting over 2.3 million automated bot interactions during its airdrop event. To address the problem, this research compares seven supervised machine learning models for detecting bot activity in Telegram-based Web3 airdrops by analyzing patterns in API requests. A total of 2600 data entries were collected: 1300 from real bot scripts and 1300 manually gathered using Telegram's built-in network tools. Each sample contains technical features such as HTTP request methods, URLs, request headers, and public IP addresses. These were further enriched with indicators of VPN usage, proxy connections, TOR relay presence, and whether the IP address was linked to a hosting provider. The result shows Gaussian Naïve Bayes and the MLP Classifier were the top performers, with$\mathbf{9 4. 4 1 \%}$validation accuracy,$\mathbf{9 4. 0 0 \%}$test accuracy, and 84.56 % accuracy when evaluated on a separate set of new data. These models accurately captured statistical patterns in bot data and complex interactions in human data. The results emphasize the importance of machine learning in securing Web3 token distribution processes.