STFN: Spatio-Temporal Fusion Network to Detect Ethereum Phishing Scams

Abstract

Due to the decentralized and transparent characteristics of the blockchain ecosystem, malicious activities such as phishing scams on the Ethereum platform result in significant financial losses for users. The current methods for detecting phishing largely rely on analyzing original transactions, which makes uncovering hidden transaction patterns challenging. To tackle this limitation, we introduce the Spatio-Temporal Fusion Network (STFN) designed to identify phishing scams on the Ethereum network. Specifically, STFN incorporates two key components: the transactions subgraph encoder for formalizing spatial features, and the transaction sequence BERT encoder for capturing temporal features. By fusing these spatio-temporal features, we facilitate their integration into a machine learning algorithm for classifying phishing accounts. The experimental outcomes underscore the effectiveness of the STFN, achieving an AUC of 93.26% and a Recall of 94.53%, outperforming previous methods for Ethereum phishing detection.