Identifying and Analyzing Cryptocurrency Manipulations in Social Media

Interest surrounding cryptocurrencies, digital or virtual currencies that are used as a medium for financial transactions, has grown tremendously in recent years. The anonymity surrounding these currencies makes investors particularly susceptible to fraud---such as "pump and dump" scams---where the goal is to artificially inflate the perceived worth of a currency, luring victims into investing before the fraudsters can sell their holdings. Because of the speed and relative anonymity offered by social platforms such as Twitter and Telegram, social media has become a preferred platform for scammers who wish to spread false hype about the cryptocurrency they are trying to pump. In this work we propose and evaluate a computational approach that can automatically identify pump and dump scams as they unfold by combining information across social media platforms. We also develop a multi-modal approach for predicting whether a particular pump attempt will succeed or not. Finally, we analyze the prevalence of bots in cryptocurrency related tweets, and observe a significant increase in bot activity during the pump attempts.Comment: Section 4. Prediction tasks: The training setup and algorithm revised. The details of the training algorithm added. More features added to the feature set. Section 5. Botometer score added as the likelihood of a user being bot. More analysis added on bot activity in cluster

The Role Of Technical Know-How In Determining The Legal Nature Of A Franchise Contract

In view of the importance of a franchise contract in disseminating knowledge, and improvement, this study came to shed light on technical knowledge and its impact on determining the legal nature of a franchise contract. It also illuminated the possibility of the existence of a weak idea or a compliance problem in this type of contract. Strengthening of concession contracts was recommended, particularly relating to the industrial sector, which would inevitably lead to development and prosperity