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Cracking Down on eBay Fraud
To help combat bogus eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) seller ratings, which can mislead customers by giving a stamp of approval to fraudulent vendors, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a technique to help validate the scores.
EBay fraudsters have found ways to artificially elevate their seller ratings, by conducting transactions with friends or using alternate online identities to post positive feedback about themselves — much to the frustration of legitimate vendors who work hard to earn genuinely positive ratings.
“We want to help people detect potential fraud before the fraud occurs,” research associate Duen Horng “Polo” Chau, one of the scientists behind the fraud detection technique, said in a statement.
Chau, along with professor Christos Faloutsos and two other students, analyzed roughly one million transactions between almost 66,000 eBay users. They plotted the transactions as a graph to identify the distinctive pattern created by sales between fraudsters and their accomplices, then designed an algorithm to detect unnaturally close-knit groups of people that traded mainly among themselves.
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Frank Swain. on December 30th, 2006 12:19 pm
About time! You can spot them if you study feedback hard and cover their contacts but it takes a long time. Is the fraud detection technique going to be made available to users?
John McKenzie on October 19th, 2008 8:29 pm
And so who do you contact when these thieves rob you? I have been robbed 3 times in 3 months for nearly $100.00 – reporting it to eBay is like jumping into a circle-jerk (pardon the term). You MUST obey their procedures, which jerks you around for 90 days, and then what…? I’m mad as hell and I want my money back!
Any serious outside links or contacts that can be made to assist in this matter?
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