| A software against online auction fraudsters |
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| Wednesday, 13 December 2006 | ||||
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When joining an auctions at websites like eBay, people usually consider “satisfaction ratings” as a guarantee, indeed users use to warn each other about their bad experiences with a seller by rating their transactions. But these “Satisfaction ratings” often turn out to be misleading because fraudsters could get around them by making transactions with friends or even themselves –under different nicknames- and giving themselves high satisfactory ratings. After discovering the trick, researchers at CMU implemented a software called Network Detection via Propagation of Beliefs (NetProbe) that looks for patterns of users who have repeated dealings with one another, and alerts other users that there is a higher probability of having a fraudulent transaction with them. Researchers used data mining techniques to identify suspicious behaviors among online buyers and sellers. Then they developed graphs that identify users interacting with unusual frequency. The software was carried out after a long analysis involving about 1 million transactions of 66.000 ebay users that turned up 10 already known fraudsters and a number of possible ones. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses a systematic approach to analyze and detect electronic auction frauds,” said computer science professor Christos Faloutsos who is leading the project. CMU is planning to publish the results of the research in 2007 and to market the product to ebay or to people who use to shop online. Ebay spokesmen didn’t comment the news but highlighted the company’s interest and commitment in protecting the transaction of its users that are more than 200 million. According to Johannes Ullrich, an Internet fraud expert who was interviewed by Associated Press , the CMU research "sounds like a credible way to detect fraud," but it should be improved in order to screen out false positives.
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An anti-fraud software for Internet auction sites has been recently developed by researchers working at Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
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