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Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
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TY - GEN
T1 - Scamming the scammers
T2 - towards automatic detection of persuasion in advance fee frauds
AU - Edwards, Matthew John
AU - Peersman, Claudia
AU - Rashid, Awais
PY - 2017/4/3
Y1 - 2017/4/3
N2 - Advance fee fraud is a significant component of online criminal activity. Fraudsters can often make off with significant sums, and victims will usually find themselves plagued by follow-up scams. Previous studies of how fraudsters persuade their victims have been limited to the initial solicitation emails sent to a broad population of email users. In this paper, we use the lens of scam-baiting – a vigilante activity whereby members of the public intentionally waste the time of fraudsters – to move beyond this first contact and examine the persuasive tactics employed by a fraudster once their victim has responded to a scam. We find linguistic patterns in scammer and baiter communications that suggest that the mode of persuasion used by scammers shifts over a conversation, and describe a corresponding stage model of scammer persuasion strategy. We design and evaluate a number of classifiers for identifying scam-baiting conversations amidst regular email, and for separating scammer from baiter messages based on their textual content, achieving high classification accuracy for both tasks. This forms a crucial basis for automated intervention, with a tool for identifying victims and a model for understanding how they are currently being exploited.
AB - Advance fee fraud is a significant component of online criminal activity. Fraudsters can often make off with significant sums, and victims will usually find themselves plagued by follow-up scams. Previous studies of how fraudsters persuade their victims have been limited to the initial solicitation emails sent to a broad population of email users. In this paper, we use the lens of scam-baiting – a vigilante activity whereby members of the public intentionally waste the time of fraudsters – to move beyond this first contact and examine the persuasive tactics employed by a fraudster once their victim has responded to a scam. We find linguistic patterns in scammer and baiter communications that suggest that the mode of persuasion used by scammers shifts over a conversation, and describe a corresponding stage model of scammer persuasion strategy. We design and evaluate a number of classifiers for identifying scam-baiting conversations amidst regular email, and for separating scammer from baiter messages based on their textual content, achieving high classification accuracy for both tasks. This forms a crucial basis for automated intervention, with a tool for identifying victims and a model for understanding how they are currently being exploited.
U2 - 10.1145/3041021.3053889
DO - 10.1145/3041021.3053889
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
SN - 9781450349147
SP - 1291
EP - 1299
BT - Second International Workshop on Computational Methods for CyberSafety (CyberSafety 2017) co-located with International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW)
PB - ACM
CY - New York
ER -