Assistant Professor · DTU Compute · Cybersecurity Engineering

Alberto Maria Mongardini

Measuring the economics of online deception — and turning deception itself into a defensive instrument.

Online fraud is not chaos; it is a market. My research measures that market at scale — how meme coins simulate growth and extract profit, how conspiracy communities monetize their audiences, how fake channels and bots operate across Telegram and blockchains — and studies how defenders can answer with deception of their own: honeypots, decoys, and accountability mechanisms. I am an Assistant Professor (tenure track) at DTU Compute, with a PhD in Computer Science from Sapienza University of Rome (2024, summa cum laude).

CV (PDF) · ORCID · LinkedIn · among (at) dtu (dot) dk

News

2026
Appointed Assistant Professor (tenure track) at DTU Compute, Cybersecurity Engineering (from September 2026).
2026
A Midsummer Meme's Dream accepted at USENIX Security 2026.
2026
Awarded the Marie Curie Seal of Excellence (score 95.8/100), European Commission, MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025.
2026
Serving on the Program Committee of ESORICS 2026.
2025
Presented TGDataset at KDD 2025, Toronto.

Research

The economics of online harm

Much of my work measures how deception makes money. I build large datasets and detection methods that expose the market structure behind online fraud: how meme coins simulate growth and extract profit from investors, how conspiracy communities monetize their audiences, and how fake channels, wash traders, and sniper bots operate at scale.

Selected workA Midsummer Meme's Dream (USENIX Security '26) · The Conspiracy Money Machine (USENIX Security '25) · TGDataset (KDD '25) · fake/clone channel detection (ACM TWEB, IEEE ICWS '23) · NFT wash trading (IEEE ICDCS '23) · sniper bots (ACM TOIT, CAAW '23)

Deception as defense

If attackers rely on deception to extract value, defenders can use it to observe, mislead, and hold them accountable. This line studies honeypots, decoy assets, and accountability mechanisms: deceptive defenses against intellectual-property theft, IP camera honeypots, LLM-generated honeywords, and attribute-driven accountability for Bitcoin transactions.

Selected workDARD (IEEE T-IFS) · Stealth and Beyond (ACNS '26) · ongoing work on honeypots and AI-driven deception with E. Vasilomanolakis (DTU)

Publications

A Midsummer Meme's Dream: Investigating Market Manipulations in the Meme Coin Ecosystem.USENIX Sec
Alberto Maria Mongardini and Alessandro Mei. USENIX Security Symposium, 2026.
Stealth and Beyond: Attribute-Driven Accountability in Bitcoin Transactions.
Alberto Maria Mongardini, Daniele Friolo, and Giuseppe Ateniese. International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS), 2026.
TGDataset: Collecting and Exploring the Largest Telegram Channels Dataset.KDD
Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, and Alberto Maria Mongardini. ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2025.
The Conspiracy Money Machine: Uncovering Telegram's Conspiracy Channels and their Profit Model.USENIX Sec
Vincenzo Imperati, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, and Francesco Sassi. USENIX Security Symposium, 2025.
DARD: Deceptive Approaches for Robust Defense against IP Theft.T-IFS
Alberto Maria Mongardini, Massimo La Morgia, Sushil Jajodia, Luigi Vincenzo Mancini, and Alessandro Mei. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
The Blockchain Warfare: Investigating the Ecosystem of Sniper Bots on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain.
Federico Cernera, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, and Francesco Sassi. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT).
Pretending to be a VIP! Characterization and Detection of Fake and Clone Channels on Telegram.
Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, and Jie Wu. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB).
Hard to See, Harder to Block: Exploring the Challenges in Email Tracking Pixels Detection.
Federico Cernera, Vincenzo Imperati, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, Eugenio Nerio Nemmi, Luciano Ortenzi, and Francesco Sassi. IEEE Access.
It's a Trap! Detection and Analysis of Fake and Clone Channels on Telegram.
Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, and Jie Wu. IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), 2023.
A Game of NFTs: Characterizing NFT Wash Trading in the Ethereum Blockchain.
Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, and Eugenio Nemmi. IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2023.
Ready, Aim, Snipe! Analysis of Sniper Bots and their Impact on the DeFi Ecosystem.
Federico Cernera, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, and Francesco Sassi. Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference (CAAW), 2023.

Full list and bibliometrics on ORCID.

Datasets & Software

TGDataset
GitHub · Zenodo
The largest public dataset of Telegram channels (120k+ channels, 400M+ messages), built to enable systematic research on deception, misinformation, and fraud. Includes preprocessing scripts and schema documentation.

Used in KDD '25, USENIX Security '25, IEEE ICWS '23, and ACM TWEB.
Meme Coin Market Manipulations
Zenodo
Replication package for the cross-chain analysis of 34,988 meme coins (Ethereum, BSC, Solana, Base): the full longitudinal dataset, Dune Analytics SQL queries, and Python detection logic for wash trading, liquidity-pool price inflation, rug pulls, and pump-and-dumps.

Official artifact of USENIX Security '26.
Conspiracy Dataset on Telegram
GitHub
A curated list of channels involved in conspiracy narratives and monetization schemes, categorized by conspiracy type with subscriber and message-frequency metadata.

Supports USENIX Security '25.
Anti-Sniping Detection Regex
Zenodo
A curated collection of regular expressions for detecting smart-contract features that counter sniper bots: cooldowns, transfer limits, and blacklists.

Used in CAAW '23 and ACM TOIT.

Students & Supervision

Interested in a thesis or PhD?

I supervise MSc and BSc projects at DTU on the measurement of online fraud, cryptocurrency market manipulation, Telegram ecosystems, honeypots, and AI-driven deception. If you like building crawlers, working with large messy datasets, and asking "who profits from this?", we will get along. Prospective PhD students: openings are announced on the DTU vacancies portal, but I am happy to hear from strong candidates early — send a short note with your CV and research interests to among (at) dtu (dot) dk.

Appointments & Education

Appointments

2026 —
Assistant Professor (Tenure Track)
DTU Compute, Cybersecurity Engineering, Denmark
2025–26
Postdoctoral Researcher
Technical University of Denmark
2024–25
Postdoctoral Researcher
Sapienza University of Rome
2023
Short-Term Scholar
George Mason University, USA (host: G. Ateniese)

Education

2020–24
PhD in Computer Science
Sapienza University of Rome — summa cum laude (advisor: A. Mei)
2019–20
MSc in Computer Science
Sapienza University of Rome — summa cum laude
2015–18
BSc in Computer Science
Sapienza University of Rome — summa cum laude

Service

PC member: ESORICS '26, ICWSM '25. Reviewer: IEEE T-IFS, ARES, IEEE ICWS, ICWSM, The Web Conference.

Contact

among (at) dtu (dot) dk

I welcome inquiries about research collaborations, speaking invitations, student projects, and press requests related to online fraud and cryptocurrency manipulation.

Curriculum Vitae (PDF) · ORCID · LinkedIn