Probing the Mystery of Cryptocurrency Theft: An Investigation into Methods for Cryptocurrency Tainting Analysis

Since the first theft of the Mt.Gox exchange service in 2011, Bitcoin has seen major thefts in subsequent years. For most thefts, the perpetrators remain uncaught and unknown. Although every transaction is recorded and transparent in the blockchain, thieves can hide behind pseudonymity and use transaction obscuring techniques to disguise their transaction trail. First, this paper investigates methods for transaction tracking with tainting analysis techniques. Second, we propose new methods applied to a specific theft case. Last, we propose a metrics-based evaluation framework to compare these strategies with the goal of improving transaction tracking accuracy.