Characterizing Bitcoin Spam Emails : An analysis of what makes certain Bitcoin spams generate millions of dollars

Bitcoin scams cause billions of dollars worth of damage every year, targeting both large corporations as well as individuals. A commonly used method for these scams is spam emails. These emails all share the same intention of trying to trick people into sending Bit- coin to the address attached in the emails, which can be done using various methods like threats and social engineering. This thesis investigates Bitcoin spam emails and tries to dis- tinguish the characteristics of the successful ones. The study was conducted by collecting data on 250,000+ Bitcoin addresses from emails that have all been reported as spam to the Bitcoinabuse website. These addresses were analyzed using their number of transactions and final balance, which were extracted with a Python script using Blockchain’s public API. It was found that the successful Bitcoin spam emails only made up a tiny percentage of the entire data set. Looking at the most successful subset of spams, a few key aspects were found that distinguished them from the rest. The most successful spam emails were using blackmail techniques such as sextortion and ransomware to fool their victims. This method is believed to work so well because of the emotional response it invokes from the victims, which in many cases is enough for them to fold. In addition, luck seemed to play a rather big role for the scams to work. The emails had to reach the perfect target: a per- son that would fall for the trick, have money to send as well as the knowledge to buy and transfer Bitcoin. To increase the odds of finding these types of people, the scammers send emails in large volumes.