STOPSCAM

Research proposal to the WebScience Summer School 2012 commissionby Martine de Vos, Peter Kraker, Tatiana Tarasova, Tobias Käfer

Leiden, The Netherlands. July 13, 2012.License: CC-BY

Looks familiar?

Source: 419eater.com

Looks familiar?

Source: Our inbox

487 million dollars reported in

losses due to online fraud in 2011Source: US Internet Crime Complaints Center

10% of online users became vicitim

of fraud in 2010 in the UKSource: Verisign

Other consequences are

kidnapping, murder, andsuicideSource: Wikipedia

Scammer sends tons of emails

one recipient

reacts

They engage in conversation and

build trust Bank transferReport to the police

The process of scamming

(hopefully)

Our focus

scammer Person A Person B Person C Bank

The process of scamming II

You are about to transfer 10,000

dollars...are you sure?

…

Pattern repository

watchdog

Computational Linguist

Developer

Computer Scientist(Machine learning)

Psychologist

team

How to stop the conversations?Patterns in hoax trust-building conversations?

How to discover the patterns?

How to discover the patterns?

Do all the tedious work…

Scambaiting communities

Message boards

Internet Crime Complaint Center

Email providers

data/consortium

Research plan, work packages

User studies

Analysis of interaction patterns

Off-line validation (historic scam data)

Real-world validation(volonteering users)

Development of User Interface

Development of detection system

Key performance indicators (KPIs):• High precision and recall in the scam detection• Reduced rate of successful scams

Outcome: Scam detection software• Plugins for off-line e-mail clients• Software for E-Mail systems• Software for Message-Boards• Software for social networks

Outlook…

Most fraud occurs offline with 3 bn dollars in the US alone

Warning! This person might

be a scammer!

Google Goggles Image Source: Thomas Hawk, CC-BYhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/