Frauds in Online Social Networks: A Review

Abstract

With the widespread use of computers, communications infrastructure, and the Internet, online social networks (OSN) have gained a huge popularity in recent years. Unfortunately, the very nature and popularity of OSN have brought about its own share of frauds and misuse. Frauds in OSN refer to activities that result in harassment, loss of money, loss of reputation of a person or an entity, loss of trust in the system or an individual, etc. Due to the complex structure, and information flow in OSN, as well as the relative anonymity of the identity, detection, control and prevention of frauds in OSN is difficult, time-consuming, error-prone and demands an unusually high level of technical finesse from the investigators. In this paper, we begin with a simple typology of OSN frauds and then follow up by describing in detail the nature of each fraud and by reviewing some of the state-of-the-art research done so far (mostly in machine learning, data mining, and text mining) to detect them. Where possible, we stress on the scale and impact of these frauds. We identify manipulation of identities and diffusion of misinformation as two important aspects in the modus operandi of most types of OSN frauds. We identify manipulation of identities and diffusion of misinformation as two important aspects in the modus operandi of most types of OSN frauds.