Feature Story: Detecting online auction fraud

Abstract

You’re bidding on an item in an online auction. How do you know you’re not being a victim of fraud? Computer Science professor Dr. Samira Sadaoui and Masters students Xuegang Wang and Swati Ganguly are developing a system to detect and react to shill activity in online auctions. Auction fraud, which represents the majority of all Internet frauds, is on the rise, and in some situations the innocent bidders are not even aware that they’ve been defrauded. Shill bidding has been recognized as one of the most dominant cheating activities in online auctions and also one of the hardest to detect since there is usually no evidence of its occurrence, unlike pre- and post-auction frauds. A shill is a person who poses as an ordinary bidder with the intent of increasing the price of the auctioned item.