A Token-based Approach to Detect Fraud in Ethereum Transactions

Abstract: As a consequence of mass unemployment being the byproduct of COVID-19, people around the world discovered investment in cryptocurrency as a means to tackle their declining financial condition. Subsequently, the prominence of Ethereum as a platform for crypto transactions also gave rise to fraudulent transactions. The need to detect these frauds exists even today. This study proposes a token-based approach to detect fraud in Ethereum transactions incorporating the ERC20 standard, by employing machine learning techniques. After cleaning and preprocessing of the dataset, the transaction data was fed to Random Forest (RF), AdaBoost, Extra Trees (ET), Gradient Boosting (GB) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) classifiers in search of the most suitable model for fraud detection. Meticulous evaluation revealed that RF, ET and XGB classifiers yielded the highest accuracy of 95%. The proposed token-based approach hence presents a novel and efficient solution for fraud detection, with room for improvement and scalability.