Systems and methods for monitoring and analyzing financial transactions on public distributed ledgers for suspicious and/or criminal activity

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-11699159-B2
Application number	US-202117153822-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jan 20, 2021
Priority date	Aug 27, 2018
Publication date	Jul 11, 2023
Grant date	Jul 11, 2023

Abstract

Systems and methods configured for monitoring and analyzing financial transactions on public distributed ledgers for suspicious and/or criminal activity are disclosed. Exemplary implementations may: access public third-party information for addresses involved in financial transactions; correlate a first portion of the public third-party information with transaction addresses; label the financial transactions and/or the addresses according to characteristics, such that individual ones of the addresses either have been labeled or are unlabeled; cluster the financial transactions and/or the addresses into a set of clusters that includes a first cluster; assign levels of risk for suspicious and/or criminal activity to the addresses and the financial transactions; and responsive to comparisons of levels of risk with a threshold, report transactions for suspicious and/or criminal activity.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A system configured for monitoring and analyzing transactions on one or more public distributed ledgers for suspicious or criminal activity, wherein the transactions include individual transactions in a set of transactions, the system comprising:
one or more hardware processors configured by machine-readable instructions to:
obtain information regarding the set of transactions recorded on a public distributed ledger, the public distributed ledger including a blockchain and an identification of individual user accounts, wherein the set of transactions includes a first individual recorded transaction and a second individual recorded transaction, wherein the first individual recorded transaction includes a first transfer from a first sender account to a first receiver account, wherein the second individual recorded transaction includes a second transfer from a second sender account to a second receiver account;
access, through a network connection, public third-party information for a second set of user accounts that includes at least one of the first sender account and the first receiver account, wherein the public third-party information originates from one or more public online sources that are external to the public distributed ledger;
determine a correlation between (a) a first portion of the public third-party information that pertains to the first sender account and (b) the first sender account, wherein the first portion of the public third-party information includes textual comments, and wherein labeling with a first label includes processing of the textual comments;
label one or more of the individual user accounts with labels representing characteristics of at least one of the one or more transactions and the user accounts, such that individual ones of the individual user accounts either have been labeled or are unlabeled, and further such that the first sender account is labeled with the first label, wherein the first label represents a first characteristic of the first individual recorded transaction, and wherein at least one of the second sender account and the second receiver account are unlabeled so far;
cluster one or more of the transactions into a set of clusters that includes a first cluster, wherein clustering is based on associations of different user accounts, wherein the individual user accounts labeled with the first label are clustered into the first cluster with at least one of:
(i) the second sender account that is unlabeled, and
(ii) the second receiver account that is unlabeled,
wherein clustering into the first cluster is based on an association between (a) one or more individual user accounts labeled with the first label and (b) at least one of the second sender account and the second receiver account, wherein the association is based on the public third-party information;

assign levels of risk for suspicious or criminal activity to the individual user accounts that have been labeled with the first label, and to one or both of the second sender account and the second receiver account;
assign levels of risk for suspicious or criminal activity to the transactions from the set of transactions, wherein a first level of risk is assigned to the first individual recorded transaction and a second level of risk is assigned to the second individual recorded transaction, wherein assignment of the first level of risk is based on at least the first label, wherein assignment of the second level of risk is based on at least the assigned levels of risk of at least one of the second sender account and the second receiver account; and
responsive to comparisons of the first level of risk and the second level of risk with a risk threshold level, record at least one of the first and second individual recorded transactions for suspicious or criminal activity.

2. The system of claim 1 , wherein the one or more hardware processors are further configured to:
obtain information regarding the set of transactions.

3. The system of claim 1 , wherein the one or more hardware processors are further configured to:
obtain a transaction graph that represents the individual transactions, wherein nodes represent the individual user accounts, wherein edges between nodes represent the individual transactions, and wherein assignment of the levels of risk for suspicious or criminal activity is based at least in part on a graph analysis of the transaction graph.

4. The system of claim 1 , wherein the first transfer is a transfer of an amount of cryptocurrency.

5. The system of claim 1 , wherein accessing the public third-party information includes obtaining the public third-party information through a web crawler.

6. The system of claim 1 , wherein labeling with the first label is further based on the correlated public third-party information pertaining to at least one of the first sender account and the first receiver account.

7. The system of claim 1 , wherein the set of transactions includes financial transactions, wherein the first individual recorded transaction includes a first sender address on the blockchain, and wherein the first sender address identifies the first sender account.

8. The system of claim 1 , wherein the one or more hardware processors are further configured by machine-readable instructions to:
assign levels of risk to the one or more public online sources such that a particular risk level is assigned to a first public online source;
wherein one or both of the assignment of the first level of risk and/or the assignment of the second level of risk is further based on the particular risk level of the first public online source.

9. The system of claim 1 , wherein the one or more hardware processors are further configured by machine-readable instructions to:
validate the first cluster by transferring a particular amount of cryptocurrency to one or more user accounts labeled with the first label and monitoring one or more balances associated with the first cluster.

10. A method configured for monitoring and analyzing transactions on one or more public distributed ledgers for suspicious or criminal activity, wherein the transactions include individual transactions in a set of transactions, the method comprising:
obtaining, through a network connection, information regarding the set of transactions recorded on a public distributed ledger, the public distributed ledger including a blockchain and an identification of individual user accounts, wherein the set of transactions includes a first individual recorded transaction and a second individual recorded transaction, wherein the first individual recorded transaction includes a first transfer from a first sender account to a first receiver account, wherein the second individual recorded transaction includes a second transfer from a second sender account to a second receiver account;
accessing, through the network connection, public third-party information for a second set of user accounts that includes at least one of the first sender account and the first receiver account, wherein the public third-party information originates from one or more public online sources that are external to the public distributed ledger;
determining a correlation between (a) a first portion of the public third-party information that pertains to the first sender account and (b) the first sender account, wherein the first portion of the public third-party information includes textual comments, and wherein labeling with a first label includes processing of the textual comments;
labeling one or more of the individual user accounts with labels representing characteristics of at least one of the one or more transactions and the user accounts, such that indi

Assignees

• Jumio Corp

Inventors

• Bayer Andreas
• Feng Kevin
• Duranske Benjamin Tyson

Classifications

• G06Q20/4016 Primary

  involving fraud or risk level assessment in transaction processing · CPC title

• H04L9/0637

  Modes of operation, e.g. cipher block chaining [CBC], electronic codebook [ECB] or Galois/counter mode [GCM] · CPC title

• G06F16/35

  Clustering; Classification · CPC title

• G06F16/951 Primary

  Indexing; Web crawling techniques · CPC title

• H04L9/3239

  involving non-keyed hash functions, e.g. modification detection codes [MDCs], MD5, SHA or RIPEMD · CPC title