Improving fraudster detection in online auctions by using neighbor-driven attributes

Abstract

Online auction websites use a simple reputation system to help their users to evaluate the trustworthiness of sellers and buyers. However, to improve their reputation in the reputation system, fraudulent users can easily deceive the reputation system by creating fake transactions. This inflated-reputation fraud poses a major problem for online auction websites because it can lead legitimate users into scams. Numerous approaches have been proposed in the literature to address this problem, most of which involve using social network analysis (SNA) to derive critical features (e.g., k-core, center weight, and neighbor diversity) for distinguishing fraudsters from legitimate users. This paper discusses the limitations of these SNA features and proposes a class of SNA features referred to as neighbor-driven attributes (NDAs). The NDAs of users are calculated from the features of their neighbors. Because fraudsters require collusive neighbors to provide them with positive ratings in the reputation system, using NDAs can be helpful for detecting fraudsters. Although the idea of NDAs is not entirely new, experimental results on a real-world dataset showed that using NDAs improves classification accuracy compared with state-of-the-art methods that use the k-core, center weight, and neighbor diversity.