Pulling Off The Mask: Forensic Analysis of the Deceptive Creator Wallets Behind Smart Contract Fraud
Mingxuan Yao, Runze Zhang, Haichuan Xu, Ryan Chou, Varun Chowdhary Paturi, Amit Kumar Sikder
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2024 · Day 2 · Continental Ballroom 6
The proliferation of smart contracts on public blockchains like Ethereum has unfortunately been accompanied by a significant rise in sophisticated fraud schemes. These schemes often involve **deceptive creator wallets (DCWs)**, which are digital wallets used by scammers to deploy numerous fraudulent contracts. Traditional investigative methods, such as tracing the flow of stolen funds, prove largely ineffective against these DCWs because the funds rarely interact directly with the creator wallet itself. This talk, "Pulling Off The Mask," introduces **Coco**, a novel forensic analysis framework designed to overcome these limitations.
AI review
This research presents Coco, a critical forensic framework that unmasks deceptive creator wallets (DCWs) orchestrating large-scale smart contract fraud. By combining deployment chain analysis with symbolic bytecode execution, Coco reveals the full scope of campaigns and their dynamic capabilities, demonstrating a profound impact on victim identification and proactive mitigation. This is exactly the kind of substantive work needed to combat sophisticated on-chain threats.