Visible to the public Fraud De-Anonymization for Fun and Profit

TitleFraud De-Anonymization for Fun and Profit
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsHernandez, Nestor, Rahman, Mizanur, Recabarren, Ruben, Carbunar, Bogdan
Conference NameProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5693-0
Keywordsapp store optimization, composability, crowdturfing, fake review, fraud de-anonymization, Metrics, opinion spam, pubcrawl, search rank fraud, Sybil attack, sybil attacks
AbstractThe persistence of search rank fraud in online, peer-opinion systems, made possible by crowdsourcing sites and specialized fraud workers, shows that the current approach of detecting and filtering fraud is inefficient. We introduce a fraud de-anonymization approach to disincentivize search rank fraud: attribute user accounts flagged by fraud detection algorithms in online peer-opinion systems, to the human workers in crowdsourcing sites, who control them. We model fraud de-anonymization as a maximum likelihood estimation problem, and introduce UODA, an unconstrained optimization solution. We develop a graph based deep learning approach to predict ownership of account pairs by the same fraudster and use it to build discriminative fraud de-anonymization (DDA) and pseudonymous fraudster discovery algorithms (PFD). To address the lack of ground truth fraud data and its pernicious impacts on online systems that employ fraud detection, we propose the first cheating-resistant fraud de-anonymization validation protocol, that transforms human fraud workers into ground truth, performance evaluation oracles. In a user study with 16 human fraud workers, UODA achieved a precision of 91%. On ground truth data that we collected starting from other 23 fraud workers, our co-ownership predictor significantly outperformed a state-of-the-art competitor, and enabled DDA and PFD to discover tens of new fraud workers, and attribute thousands of suspicious user accounts to existing and newly discovered fraudsters.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3243734.3243770
DOI10.1145/3243734.3243770
Citation Keyhernandez_fraud_2018