Initial coin offering (ICO) has attracted a lot of attention from the public in recent years due to
its association with potentially fraudulent activities. In order to offer practical implications to
investors and regulators when evaluating ICO projects, this study examines the use of
textual analysis in detecting potential ICO fraud cases. By using Linguistic Inquiry and Word
Count (LIWC), we extracted the textual characteristics of 1,402 English whitepapers that may
have been indicators of potential fraud based on the prior literature, including first-person …