Curriculum Learning for Ethereum Phishing Scam Detection

Abstract

The rise of Ethereum in various economic and social domains has made it a prime target for illegal activities, particularly phishing scams, which has caused substantial financial losses. Existing methods mainly model transaction records as networks and classify nodes. However, a particular challenge is that not all transactions involved in phishing nodes are illegal, which makes phishing detection very difficult. In order to address the problem, in this paper, we propose a Curriculum Learning-based method for Ethereum phishing detection. We incorporate the Local Outlier Factor to measure the difficulty of nodes, considering the significant feature differences among nodes of the same class. By assigning lower difficulty values to easily identifiable nodes and higher difficulty values to nodes involved in mixed-class transactions, we ensure an effective difficulty measure. Then we gradually increase the number of training nodes input into Graph Convolutional Network in each epoch based on a certain ratio determined by the sorted difficulty scores. Finally, we employ LightGBM as the classifier for identifying phishing nodes. Experimental evaluations on a real-world Ethereum phishing scam dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method over baseline approaches, as evidenced by several evaluation metrics.