A brief research on the metrics used to detect Social Media Fraud

1. SocialMediaFraudMetrics
Founta Antigoni-Maria
Moutidis Iraklis
Kostopoulos Giorgos

2. Whatisit?
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

3. Whyitmatters?
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

4. Metrics
One 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.

5. Patternsonthenetwork

6. Graphmetrics 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.

7. GraphMetrics II
Strongly / 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.

8. 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

9. Questions?
Thankyouforyourattention!