We are excited to announce that Prof. Nadia Pocher from University of Luxembourg, will be delivering a seminar on The evolving landscape of crypto crime and the role of blockchain analytics.
Abstract: Crypto-assets are misused for a wide range of illicit activities, including fraud, money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and various forms of cybercrime. Recent estimates suggest that illicit actors received over USD 40 billion in crypto-assets in 2024 alone, with “pig butchering” scams emerging as a particularly prominent threat within an increasingly professionalized criminal ecosystem. Because public blockchains combine the pseudonymity of transacting parties with ledger transparency, they can simultaneously hinder and enable investigative and enforcement efforts as well as compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) obligations.
Leveraging public ledger data, on-chain analytics has become a key instrument for identifying suspicious crypto-asset activity and tracing illicit fund flows. In parallel, private-sector organizations have developed proprietary models and datasets that support compliance functions and law enforcement by facilitating the attribution of blockchain addresses to real-world entities. While these services play a key role in mapping the socio-technical networks through which crypto-assets are exchanged, independent empirical research remains scarce and significantly constrained by a lack of publicly available, non-proprietary datasets.
Against this backdrop, this talk offers an interdisciplinary account of crypto crime and on-chain transaction analysis at the intersection of blockchain forensics, machine learning, and compliance and regulatory practice. It introduces core technical and regulatory building blocks, including address attribution and clustering heuristics as well as network and graph-based methods. It then examines pig butchering scams, highlighting characteristic on-chain patterns and the practical challenges of translating behavioral signals into actionable intelligence. Finally, the talk argues how information systems research can help bridge these domains and support more effective AML/CFT compliance, investigation, and enforcement.
Short Bio: Nadia Pocher is a postdoctoral researcher in Information Systems at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, as well as member of the Leadership Team of the FutureFinTech National Centre of Excellence in Research & Innovation. In March 2023, she received her Ph.D. in Law, Science and Technology, excellent cum laude, from the University of Bologna, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and K.U. Leuven. In her research, Nadia explores the mutual influences between emerging technologies – such as decentralization technologies as well as novel applications of cryptography and artificial intelligence (AI) – and regulatory compliance in the financial services sector. Her profile has a strong interdisciplinary orientation, and her work is driven by her interest in the socio-technical challenges that arise at the interface of regulation and innovation for institutions, organizations, and end-users.research focuses on resource-aware machine learning, performance characterization of data-intensive systems, and scalability and efficiency of data-intensive systems on modern hardware.
Host: Prof. Liudmila Zavolokina
