Social Media Fraud Metrics

Founta Antigoni-MariaMoutidis IraklisKostopoulos Giorgos

What is it?Social media fraud is a new threat on the internet. The main form of it is when someone (person / group) creates a fake account in order to perform a number of malicious actions such as:

○ Identity theft○ Promotion of a product / service○ Make other accounts seem valid / prestigious○ Generate fake revenue from clicks views○ Criminal actions (horror stories)○ Network attacks

Why it matters?Detecting fake accounts and fraud groups on social media is crucial both for the social media companies and the users.

● Big loses from fake revenue● Damaging the image of the company● Identity theft can cost a lot of time and money to the

victim● Some malicious users can be dangerous

MetricsOne kind of fraud metrics is to detect Patterns into the social media network graph using SNA.

Also Graph Metrics such as Density, Centrality (Closeness/Betweenness) and Strongly / Weakly Connected Components can help to identify potential fraud behaviours.

Patterns on the network

Graph metrics I Density measures are extremely useful in determining potential fraud hotspots in retail banking. Credit card transaction monitoring and money-laundering are potentially two areas where density metrics could trigger the necessity for deeper investigations.

Centrality can be used to identify the nodes that are pivotal to the success of the fraud network and, in turn, focus resources on investigating these high return suspects.

Graph Metrics IIStrongly / Weakly Connected Components (SCC/WCC) can be used after identifying a malicious user in the network (node). The reason is that fraud accounts tend to connect with each other in order to look valid.

References[1]Fake Identities in Social Media: A Case Study on the Sustainability of the Facebook Business Model - Katharina Krombholz, Dieter Merkl, Edgar Weippl

[2]Implementing social network analysis for fraud prevention - CGI

[3]A Few Bad Votes Too Many? Towards Robust Ranking in Social Media - Jiang Bian, Yandong Liu, Eugene Agichtein, Hongyuan Zha

[4]ND-S YNC : Detecting Synchronized Fraud Activities - Maria Giatsoglou, Despoina Chatzakou, Neil Shah, Alex Beutel, Christos Faloutsos and Athena Vakali

Questions?Thank you for your attention!