Wash trading is considered a highly inopportune and illegal behavior in regulated markets. Instead, it is practiced in unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency or NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) markets. Regarding the latter, in the past many researchers have been interested in this phenomenon from an “ex-ante” perspective, aiming to identify and classify wash trading activities before or at the exact time they happen. In this paper, we want to investigate the phenomenon of wash trading in the NFT market from a completely different perspective, namely “ex-post”. Our ultimate goal is to analyze wash trading activities in the past to understand whether the game is worth the candle, i.e., whether these illicit activities actually lead to a significant profit for their perpetrators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper in the literature that attempts to answer this question in a “structured” way. The efforts to answer this question have enabled us to make some additional contributions to the literature in this research area. They are: (i) a framework to support future “ex-post” analyses of the NFT wash trading phenomenon; (ii) a new dataset on wash trading transactions involving NFTs that can support further future investigations of this phenomenon; (iii) a set of insights of the NFT wash trading phenomenon extracted at the end of an experimental campaign.

The concept of scope was introduced in Social Network Analysis to assess the authoritativeness and convincing ability of a user toward other users on one or more social platforms. It has been studied in the past in some specific contexts, for example to assess the ability of a user to spread information on Twitter. In this paper, we propose a new investigation on scope, as we want to assess the scope of the sentiment of a user on a topic. We also propose a multi-dimensional definition of scope. In fact, besides the traditional spatial scope, we introduce the temporal one, which has never been addressed in the literature, and propose a model that allows the concept of scope to be extended to further dimensions in the future. Furthermore, we propose an approach and a related set of parameters for measuring the scope of the sentiment of a user on a topic in a social network. Finally, we illustrate the results of an experimental campaign we conducted to evaluate the proposed framework on a dataset derived from Reddit. The main novelties of this paper are: (i) a multi-dimensional view of scope; (ii) the introduction of the concept of sentiment scope; (iii) the definition of a general framework capable of analyzing the sentiment scope related to any subject on any social network.