Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: P, Dinesh Srivasthav, Apte, Manoj
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00757
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915087618408448
author P, Dinesh Srivasthav
Apte, Manoj
author_facet P, Dinesh Srivasthav
Apte, Manoj
contents For different factors/reasons, ranging from inherent characteristics and features providing decentralization, enhanced privacy, ease of transactions, etc., to implied external hardships in enforcing regulations, contradictions in data sharing policies, etc., cryptocurrencies have been severely abused for carrying out numerous malicious and illicit activities including money laundering, darknet transactions, scams, terrorism financing, arm trades. However, money laundering is a key crime to be mitigated to also suspend the movement of funds from other illicit activities. Billions of dollars are annually being laundered. It is getting extremely difficult to identify money laundering in crypto transactions owing to many layering strategies available today, and rapidly evolving tactics, and patterns the launderers use to obfuscate the illicit funds. Many detection methods have been proposed ranging from naive approaches involving complete manual investigation to machine learning models. However, there are very limited datasets available for effectively training machine learning models. Also, the existing datasets are static and class-imbalanced, posing challenges for scalability and suitability to specific scenarios, due to lack of customization to varying requirements. This has been a persistent challenge in literature. In this paper, we propose behavior embedded entity-specific money laundering-like transaction simulation that helps in generating various transaction types and models the transactions embedding the behavior of several entities observed in this space. The paper discusses the design and architecture of the simulator, a custom dataset we generated using the simulator, and the performance of models trained on this synthetic data in detecting real addresses involved in money laundering.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_00757
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Static Datasets: A Behavior-Driven Entity-Specific Simulation to Overcome Data Scarcity and Train Effective Crypto Anti-Money Laundering Models
P, Dinesh Srivasthav
Apte, Manoj
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
For different factors/reasons, ranging from inherent characteristics and features providing decentralization, enhanced privacy, ease of transactions, etc., to implied external hardships in enforcing regulations, contradictions in data sharing policies, etc., cryptocurrencies have been severely abused for carrying out numerous malicious and illicit activities including money laundering, darknet transactions, scams, terrorism financing, arm trades. However, money laundering is a key crime to be mitigated to also suspend the movement of funds from other illicit activities. Billions of dollars are annually being laundered. It is getting extremely difficult to identify money laundering in crypto transactions owing to many layering strategies available today, and rapidly evolving tactics, and patterns the launderers use to obfuscate the illicit funds. Many detection methods have been proposed ranging from naive approaches involving complete manual investigation to machine learning models. However, there are very limited datasets available for effectively training machine learning models. Also, the existing datasets are static and class-imbalanced, posing challenges for scalability and suitability to specific scenarios, due to lack of customization to varying requirements. This has been a persistent challenge in literature. In this paper, we propose behavior embedded entity-specific money laundering-like transaction simulation that helps in generating various transaction types and models the transactions embedding the behavior of several entities observed in this space. The paper discusses the design and architecture of the simulator, a custom dataset we generated using the simulator, and the performance of models trained on this synthetic data in detecting real addresses involved in money laundering.
title Beyond Static Datasets: A Behavior-Driven Entity-Specific Simulation to Overcome Data Scarcity and Train Effective Crypto Anti-Money Laundering Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00757