Pumps and Dumps in the Cryptocurrency Underground | Twitter as a School for Crime

Prof. David Décary-Hétu’s work examines how technology is reshaping fraud, cybercrime, and offender behaviour. Through projects under the HC2P, his research focuses on how offenders use digital tools to target victims, how law enforcement can use technology to investigate them, and how researchers can build better datasets to understand crime. His work pays particular attention to fraudsters, cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes, online hacker communities, and the ways offenders communicate, collaborate, share knowledge, and distribute tools. 

A major part of Prof. Décary-Hétu’s research involves developing advanced data collection tools for instant messaging platforms. His team built large-scale systems to collect, organize, translate, transcribe, and analyze data from thousands of online chat rooms, creating searchable databases containing hundreds of millions of messages. These tools allow researchers to study online offender communities at scale, including how they form, evolve, disengage, and disappear over time.

His findings highlight the serious social impact of fraud in Canada and the need for stronger awareness, policy attention, and law enforcement capacity. In his cryptocurrency research, he found that online hype from influencers can drive short-term price increases, allowing a small group to profit while many others lose money. Prof. Décary-Hétu emphasizes that people should be cautious of get-rich-quick schemes and that fraud should be treated as a pressing societal issue, especially because many offenders targeting Canadians may also be operating from within Canada.