Online Auction Fraud Detection in Privacy-Aware Reputation Systems

With a privacy-aware reputation system, an auction website allows the buyer in a transaction to hide his/her identity from the public for privacy protection. However, fraudsters can also take advantage of this buyer-anonymized function to hide the connections between themselves and their accomplices. Traditional fraudster detection methods become useless for detecting such fraudsters because these methods rely on accessing these connections to work effectively. To resolve this problem, we introduce two attributes to quantify the buyer-anonymized activities associated with each user and use them to reinforce the traditional methods. Experimental results on a dataset crawled from an auction website show that the proposed attributes effectively enhance the prediction accuracy for detecting fraudsters, particularly when the proportion of the buyer-anonymized activities in the dataset is large. Because many auction websites have adopted privacy-aware reputation systems, the two proposed attributes should be incorporated into their fraudster detection schemes to combat these fraudulent activities.