Seth DuBois
Investigator
Chainalysis
Webinar 2 JUNE 2026, 10:00 AM EDt / 15:00 GMT+1
Inside an Investment Scam Operation: How We Find Victims and Scale Detection
A text message from an unknown number. A move to WhatsApp. A “professional investment mentor” promising significant returns. Step-by-step instructions on how to lie to your bank. Behind every approval phishing victim is a well-rehearsed social engineering playbook, designed to build trust, strip security, and drain wallets.Investigating approval phishing one victim at a time doesn’t scale. But the on-chain patterns these schemes leave behind do.Starting with a real case, we’ll show how investigators identified the key on-chain signatures of approval phishing, then transformed them into automated, SQL-driven workflows using Chainalysis Data Solutions that scan the blockchain for illicit activity at scale.
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What You’ll Learn
- The red flags hiding in plain sight: coached non-compliance, security stripping, false urgency, and other social engineering tactics that signal a victim is being guided by a scammer.
- How approval phishing works on-chain, from the malicious
approve()transaction to the drain, and the investigative techniques used to identify additional victims, map associated clusters, and trace funds through consolidation wallets to exchange off-ramps. - How to scale from a single-victim case to mapping an entire fraud network using pattern recognition and Chainalysis Data Solutions to automate detection across the blockchain.
