  Over the past few years, there has been a growth in activity, public
knowledge, and awareness of cryptocurrencies and related blockchain technology.
As the industry has grown, there has also been an increase in scams looking to
steal unsuspecting individuals cryptocurrency. Many of the scams operate on
visually similar but seemingly unconnected websites, advertised by malicious
social media accounts, which either attempt an advance-fee scam or operate as
phishing websites. This paper analyses public online and blockchain-based data
to provide a deeper understanding of these cryptocurrency scams. The clustering
technique DBSCAN is applied to the content of scam websites to discover a
typology of advance-fee and phishing scams. It is found that the same entities
are running multiple instances of similar scams, revealed by their online
infrastructure and blockchain activity. The entities also manufacture public
blockchain activity to create the appearance that their scams are genuine.
Through source and destination of funds analysis, it is observed that victims
usually send funds from fiat-accepting exchanges. The entities running these
scams cash-out or launder their proceeds using a variety of avenues including
exchanges, gambling sites, and mixers.
