The behavioral sign of account theft: Realizing online payment fraud alert

Abstract

As a matter of fact, it is usually taken for granted that the occurrence of unauthorized behaviors is necessary for the fraud detection in online payment services. However, we seek to break this stereotype in this work. We strive to design an ex-ante anti-fraud method that can work before unauthorized behaviors occur. The feasibility of our solution is supported by the cooperation of a characteristic and a finding in online payment fraud scenarios: The well-recognized characteristic is that online payment frauds are mostly caused by account compromise. Our finding is that account theft is indeed predictable based on users' high-risk behaviors, without relying on the behaviors of thieves. Accordingly, we propose an account risk prediction scheme to realize the ex-ante fraud detection. It takes in an account's historical transaction sequence, and outputs its risk score. The risk score is then used as an early evidence of whether a new transaction is fraudulent or not, before the occurrence of the new transaction. We examine our method on a real-world B2C transaction dataset from a commercial bank. Experimental results show that the ex-ante detection method can prevent more than 80% of the fraudulent transactions before they actually occur. When the proposed method is combined with an interim detection to form a real-time anti-fraud system, it can detect more than 94% of fraudulent transactions while maintaining a very low false alarm rate (less than 0.1%).