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As the mobile era matures, it is increasingly competitive to market mobile apps, forcing companies to invest heavily on mobile user acquisition campaigns. This has unfortunately given birth to a new form of Internet fraud, which we refer to as ''app distribution fraud''. This new fraud involves collusion between ISPs and fraudulent app distributors where app download is hijacked/redirected. In this paper, we have the unique opportunity to cooperate with a major e-commerce company (with about 0.2 billion active users per month) to take a first peek at this problem. Through the nationwide measurement results, we find that app distribution fraud is ubiquitous yet stealthy --- about 1.55% app downloads are hijacked/redirected, affecting more than 75% of the cities we tested and causing an estimated 7.46 billion U.S. dollars financial loss per year. We follow up with additional measurements on the technical mechanism of the fraud and the scope of the fraud (i.e., what other apps are also affected). Surprisingly, we find that sometimes the original app a user intends to download can be replaced with a completely different app, rendering the user's device at risks.

Purpose: systematization, theoretical substantiation of approaches to the formation of an effective system for the prevention of financial fraud in the banking sector through the global Internet. To achieve this, the article discusses the types, reasons and conditions for the emergence and spread of Internet fraud, as well as ways to prevent them. Discussion: in connection with the active growth of Internet fraud in the financial sector, questions about the types of cyber fraud, the reasons, how they are detected and methods of protection are becoming relevant. The growing number of cybercrimes in the financial sector testifies to the imperfection of legislation in this area, financial illiteracy of the population, which affects not only the welfare of the population, but also the financial system as a whole. An analysis of the situation that has developed in the financial sphere of Russia to date shows the synergy of the negative impacts of the global economic crisis and various internal causes. Taking into account the Russian financial and economic specifics, the level of distribution and the extent of damage from financial fraud in its most diverse forms and types have become one of the important criteria for assessing the crime situation in our country. The globalization of world civilization has made the interdependence of the world and Russian financial systems obvious. At the same time, the situation is complicated by the fact that at present the nature of fraud in our country will acquire a more sophisticated intellectual character. From the foregoing, it becomes necessary to investigate the problem of fraudulent activities in the financial markets in order to timely identify fraudsters and to avoid illegal actions on their part. Results: the types of fraudulent activities were considered and solutions were proposed to counteract them. An algorithm of actions aimed at establishing the reliability of the company is presented. The result of the work is the main preventive measures aimed at preventing and countering Internet fraud.

Email spam is one of the primary means to facilitate the perpetration of internet fraud and the distribution of malware. The present research sought to examine the impact of routine activity theory at the national level on three forms of cybercrime perpetrated through email spam. A sample of 871,146 spam email messages sent in 2012 were divided into three categories: fraudulent emails, emails spreading malware, and non-serious spam emails. The measures were then aggregated by country and five measures of routine activity theory at the national level were tested for their impact on cybercrime among 120 nations. Concurrent with prior research, the results indicated that internet users per capita positively predicted all three forms of cybercrime. Unlike previous research, GDP presented a different relationship amongst all three outcomes: positive for spam, negative for fraud, and nonsignificant for malware. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

In modern conditions of information technologies constant integration into a person’s everyday life, the problem of the formation and manifestation of new risks while using the Internet is aggravated. According to international and all-Russian data, there is a significant increase in the number of cybercrimes, new forms of Internet fraud are constantly appearing and the actual damage from illegal actions in the virtual space is increasing. Young people, as the most active users of the global network, become targets of Internet fraudsters. The purpose of the study is to study the representatives attitude of modern youth to fraud on the Internet, as well as to various forms of its manifestation. The theoretical and methodological analysis of the study was carried out on the basis of the deviant behavior theories and the theory of manipulation. To obtain primary sociological data, the work used the method of young people online survey living in Tyumen. The survey was conducted in the summer of 2020. According to the results of the study, the attitude of modern young people representatives to Internet fraud was determined. It was recorded that the overwhelming majority (85%) of young people faced various manifestations of fraud on the Internet, while every fourth (26%) respondent suffered from this negative social phenomenon. Most often, fraud on the Internet by young people is recorded in virtual social networks using social engineering technologies. In addition, not all forms of online fraud are well known to young people, for example, just under half of the respondents are aware of online banking fraud. Overall in the sample, young people negatively assess Internet fraud as a phenomenon, although there are some different opinions depending on their personal life experiences. In the conclusion of the article, possible prospects for further research in this area are identified.

The article considers the creation of theoretical and applied provisions for supplementing and improving the methodology of Internet fraud investigations. The aim of the study was to identify typical situations of investigation of these crimes and to develop the algorithm of the investigator’s actions in these situations. The methodological basis of the research was the dialectical method, modeling, the system-structural method, the specific sociological method, the method of expert assessments, logical methods. The situational approach was used. Considering the peculiarities of making tactical and managerial decisions at various stages of the investigator’s activity in Internet fraud investigations, the typical situations of checking crime reports and of the initial and subsequent stages of the investigation have been identified. The determination of typical investigative situations at each of the indicated stages was based on the results of the study of materials of judicial practice in criminal cases on Internet frauds, a survey of investigators on the problems of investigating these crimes. It has been revealed that the stage of checking the report of Internet fraud, depending on the source and amount of information, is characterized by two situations: either by the lack of primary information about the presence of signs of a crime (95%), or, conversely, by information sufficient to make a final procedural decision (5%). The initial stage of the investigation of Internet fraud, depending on the content of the initial information, is characterized by situations determined by the presence (80%) or absence (17.5%) of identified digital footprints in conjunction with the establishment of the method of committing a crime, victims and witnesses, the lack of information about the fraudster. A far less likely situation is characterized by the establishment of digital footprints, the method of committing a crime, victims and witnesses, the presence of some information on the criminal, but the lack of data about his/her location (2.5%). Three typical situations of the subsequent stage of the investigation of these crimes are classified depending on the degree of the confession of guilt by the accused and the sufficiency of evidence. The most common situation is characterized by the confession of guilt by the accused and the availability of necessary evidence in the case (90%). In each typical situation, the algorithm of the investigator’s actions is determined, methodological recommendations on the tactics of individual investigative actions are developed taking into account the specifics of the crimes committed. Particular attention is paid to the issues of working with digital footprints, the necessary software and hardware are indicated; to the features of the tactics of inspecting the scene, mobile and computer devices; to the determination of the issues to be clarified during the interrogation of the accused, victims, witnesses.

The object of this research is the process of victimization of population of the Russian Federation from Internet fraud in the period from 2010 to 2019. The subject of this research is a number of criminological indicators that characterize the dynamics of victimization and criminal victimization. Using the empirical data, the author determines the actual number of the Internet fraud victims; built a retrospective model of development of this process based on calculation of the average annual rate of growth; increases awareness on the dynamics of the number of victims until 2013. The conclusion is made on the growing scope of victimization, which according to the data of assorted research of 2013-2019 carries an exponential function. Each three years the total number of victims doubles, which continues to grow since 2012 (associated with the reform of criminal legislation aimed at identification of the additional types of fraud using computer technologies). This pattern was used for structuring the projection models of victimization of users of the Russian segment of the Internet until 2021 (inclusively). The results of additional assorted research of 2020 demonstrate that only in 20% of cases the damage from Internet fraud exceeds 1,000 rubles. In accordance of the principle of recurrence of the Internet fraud, the structure of victimization is as follows: 52% are the victims of such crimes in recent year; 1/3 of respondents were the victims in previous years, but not in recent year; and only 13% became the victims in past years and recent year. &nbsp

Este artigo busca inspiração no ensaio de Chomsky (1967) sobre a responsabilidade dos intelectuais nas guerras imperialistas dos EUA para conclamar os linguistas a denunciar o uso das tecnologias de fala e linguagem nos mecanismos de controle da opinião pública do capitalismo atual. Para tanto, analisa a expansão e popularização dessa tecnologia como passo decisivo na consolidação do capitalismo digital do século XXI. Aponta, ainda, a sua mercantilização como fonte de mudanças no mercado de trabalho global conducentes à precarização em todos os campos, inclusive a ciência. Expõe, por fim, a exploração da mão de obra científica precarizada pelas gigantes da tecnologia digital como um dos principais meios da captura de dados pessoais via internet – um negócio ainda à espera de regulamentação.

Online romance fraud (ORF) is a growing concern with such serious negative consequences as financial loss or suicide to the victim. Majority of empirical studies on online romance fraud using attachment, deception, protection motivation and relation theories focus on the victim. While neutralization offers insights into how individuals justify their deviant behaviors, the results have not been consistent in different contexts. In the ORF context, offenders may not only rely on justifying techniques but also rationalize their actions by denying risk both to the victim and the offender. Thus, drawing from the neutralization and denial of risk theories, we develop a research model to explain how online romance offenders justify and rationalize their intended criminal activities. To confirm our theoretical model, we collected 320 responses from individuals at Internet Cafes alleged to be online romance fraud hotspots. Our results highlight the boundary conditions of neutralization techniques in the context of online romance fraud. The study shows that denial of risk, a rationalization mechanism, moderates the relationship between denial of victim, a justification technique, and intention to commit romance fraud. This insight advances the frontiers of neutralization theory. We offer both theoretical and managerial implications of the findings.

The world has been gradually entering the fourth industrial revolution, where a new wave of technological advancement will bring humanity into a new era of globalization. Global supply chains will become more efficient while reducing transport costs, which will contribute to opening new markets and drive economic growth. According to an analysis by the World Economic Forum, the fourth industrial revolution will increase the level of global income and quality of life for people around the world. However, increasing intersectionality and emerging technological trends will expose humanity to new forms of security challenges, risks and threats such as Internet fraud and data theft, cyberattacks, large-scale spontaneous migration, climate change, etc., as stated in the 2020 Global Economic Forum's Global Risk Report.

Existing system dealing with online complaint provides a final decision without explanations. We propose to analyse the complaint text of internet fraud in a fine-grained manner. Considering the complaint text includes multiple clauses with various functions, we propose to identify the role of each clause and classify them into different types of fraud element. We construct a large labeled dataset originated from a real finance service platform. We build an element identification model on top of BERT and propose additional two modules to utilize the context of complaint text for better element label classification, namely, global context encoder and label refiner. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our model., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables accepted as a short paper to CIKM 2021

Internet fraud is an important research topic in the field of cyberspace security. In this paper, on the one hand, the public news text obtained from portal is taken as the data source. The word frequency statistics and regular expression method are used to calculate the monthly growth rate of the time hot spot, and the thermal temporal and spatial models are constructed. On the other hand, we use the double index dictionary method and the K means clustering algorithm to construct the spatio-temporal distribution module and early warning module. What’s more, we build the visual modeling of the above work. The results show that in recent years, China's online fraud cases showed a low growth rate, from outside to inside. Not only this research enriches the analytical methods in related fields, but also can provide some scientific basis for the decision of relevant departments.

The portion of machine learning (ML) is deep learning (DL). Machine learning (ML) is the study of computer algorithms. It constructs a model using training data, often referred to as sample data for prediction. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a sub-branch in the field of computer science (CS). With the help of training data, ML algorithms construct a model, often referred to as sample data for prediction and decision-making. Programming is often needed to do something with computers, but by implementing a model generated by machine learning algorithms it can prevent programming and to do what programming can do without programming assistance. Machine learning algorithms can be used widely in various real-world applications such as e-mail filtering, computer networks, natural language processing, search engines, telecommunications, Internet fraud detection and DNA sequence classification. Three types of learning algorithms are present: supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement. Machine learning ML is a widely used multidisciplinary field which uses various training models and algorithms to predict, classify and analyse any statistical data by the use of computer science algorithms. This paper is going to address deep learning techniques such as single-shot detector (SSD), scale-invariant feature transform (sfit), histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and many more. The main aim is to detect cybercrimes through the assistance of the above-mentioned techniques.

The paper analyzes the statistics of implementing known information threats, considers new types of Internet fraud and develops recommendations for protecting against unauthorized actions of Internet scammers. Internet fraud has long gone beyond mailing and has become widespread. Fraudsters operate in almost all spheres of human activity, and with the advent of various means of communication their activities have acquired new trends. The most common methods of online fraud are the following: fake shops with Internet sales, phishing, fundraising for charity, dating sites, viral content. The paper shows that the considered methods of Internet fraud are connected not so much with the Internet as directly with the user. Internet users should not only be aware of possible types and schemes of fraud, but also take care of software protection methods such as antivirus and timely updating all applications, browsers and systems. Only being up to date, constantly learning and being interested in both new threats and methods of their protection users can protect themselves and their loved ones from losses.

The paper analyzes the results of studying the current practice of identifying, fixing, preserving and anticipating the forensic examination of the study of digital traces of crime. As a toolkit for monitoring investigative and operational investigative activities in this area, there were applied personal conversations and surveys of employees of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, investigative and operational search units of the Ministry of the Interior of Russia, employees of other services and departments, students of the relevant specialization. In addition, experts in the field of computer information technologies from both the private and public sector, involved in investigative actions and operational search activities were interviewed.The paper presents the results of this study, identifying current problems of criminal justice, faced by law enforcement officials investigating crimes involving information and computer technology, while seizing and recording computer information.

Existing theories of fraud provide some insight into how criminals target and exploit people in the online environment; whilst reference to psychological explanations is common, the actual use of established behavioural theories and/or methods in these studies is often limited. In particular, there is less understanding of why certain people/demographics are likely to respond to fraudulent communications. This systematic review will provide a timely synthesis of the leading psychologically based literature to establish the key theories and empirical research that promise to impact on anti-fraud policies and campaigns. Relevant databases and websites were searched using terms related to psychology and fraud victimisation. A total of 44 papers were extracted and 34 included in the final analysis. The studies range in their scope and methods; overall, three main factors were identified: message (n = 6), experiential (n = 7), and dispositional (n = 21), although there was some overlap between these (for example, mapping message factors onto the dispositional traits of the victim). Despite a growing body of research, the total number of studies able to identify specific psychological processes associated with increased susceptibility to online fraud victimisation was limited. Messages are targeted to appeal to specific psychological vulnerabilities, the most successful linking message with human factors, for example, time-limited communications designed to enact peripheral rather than central information processing. Suggestions for future research and practical interventions are discussed.

As a new kind of contactless crime, the telecom and internet fraud has become a public hazard, with criminals targeting massive numbers of innocent victims. It is a prominent criminal problem that ...

This research presents e-fraud types and clarifies the suggestions that have been reached to deal with the problems of electronic fraud so as not to be victims of this fraud, and explains how to act when detecting electronic fraud, especially with the spread of the Internet through institutions to make them more secure. Therefore, Arab countries must take a series of steps and strategies at all levels, particularly those organizational steps, which make many texts and provisions used effectively to prevent cybercrime. States should therefore take all legal measures to punish various types of attacks on information systems.

The sphere of cybercrime is characterized by special difficulties in disclosing these acts due to the boundlessness of the digital space. These crimes are of a cross-border nature, which is aggravated by the inclusion of organized crime in this sphere. The complexity of the investigation also lies in the fact that there is no single international definition of cybercrime and cyber attacks. Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed the global cyberspace landscape. In this article, the authors make an attempt to determine exactly which crimes relate to cybercrime and what changes in the field of cybercrime have arisen due to the coronavirus pandemic, determine possible recommendations for combating crimes in this area.

With the development of the Internet and the increased popularity of web applications, the web has become one of the main venues for attackers engaging in cybercrimes. While enjoying the convenience of web applications, consumers also face security problems, such as the leakage of sensitive information and Internet fraud. Security protection mechanisms, such as traditional intrusion detection systems (IDSs) and web application firewalls (WAFs), are becoming incompetent at defending against the new cyber-attacks. In this paper, we propose a web attack detection approach that takes advantage of analysing the malicious intentions hidden in user actions. First, after using the independent user behaviours to build a sequential behaviour model, the proposed approach extracts the hidden malicious intentions of attackers from normal and seemingly normal behaviours utilizing a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. Then, on the basis of the user intentions, the approach leverages ensemble learning techniques to integrate extra inherent features of abnormal behaviour, resulting in its efficient practicality. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the CSIC 2010 dataset with 99.87% accuracy.

Children online activities are of various categories, some are beneficial and some harmful to their wellbeing and development. For instance, children make use of phones of various types to browse online, and utilize both personal and cybercafe computers (desktop and laptop systems) to browse. Beneficial uses to which they engage online activities include search for information to- solve assignments they are given in school (Pre-college and college), play and download music (which relaxes the mind and body), download films for recreation (though some may teach them bad things and ideas), search for sports related information of their favorite sportsmen and teams, chat with friends for association and socials), and communicate with relations of distant geographical locations. Harmful effects includes- exposure to risk of being absorbed as members of terrorist groups under disguise, involvement in internet fraud and scams, download and watching of cartoon (fictional videos which may over glue them into an unreal world of excessive fantasies they could wrongly and fatally connect with as reality in life). It has been proven that overindulgence of children on virtual or fictional watching of films disconnects them from lessons, knowledge and real life cognitive experiences they are to learn from real life interactions with parents, guardians, good friends and good relations. These sort of lessons cannot be learnt by being over-glued on phone and computer screens watching fictional cartoon and playing games. As such, this piece of review is significant and of positive value in supporting the rightful development of our children, in order to help secure their future, through reduction in the number of those who could be at risk of being plagued by the negative effects of children’s online activities.

In this paper, we estimate the inefficiency in online auctions. Online auctions can be inefficient due to the Internet fraud. A typical example of Internet fraud is when sellers do not send goods to winning bidders even though they have received payment. Therefore, bidders always bear a risk of fraud, and this risk may lead to transaction failure. In our empirical example, we use eBay PlayStation 3 auctions held in 2009. We find that the efficiency loss is over $30 for more than 5% of online auctions. Furthermore, we also find the probability of the inefficient online auction is more than 0.25.

The development of the Internet has contributed to a faster and easier transfer and greater availability of information. Unfortunately, an increasing number of Internet users and services have also resulted in the increase of various cyber crimes. Fraud is one of the most common and prominent property-related crimes committed on the Internet. In this paper, the author presents and discusses the basic criminological and criminal law characteristics of Internet fraud as a form of cyber crime. Focusing on the criminal regulation of the Republic of Serbia, the author discusses the similarities and differences between the traditional criminal offense of fraud and the computer fraud that can be committed on the Internet. In illustration, the author elaborates on the emergence and modus operandi of the fraudulent scheme known as the 'Nigerian Scam' (advance-fee fraud), considering that many Serbian citizens fell victim to this type of fraud. The author underscores the importance of primary prevention aimed at combating Internet fraud and provides advice how to preclude victimization and thus contribute to reducing the prevalence of the cyber crime.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings and lessons that were learned from the many cases of internet fraud complaints that are gathered by the Federal Trade Commission in the USA. The implications that are contained in the behavior of the complaints and trends identified are critical for addressing all types of online criminal activities in the increasing world of cybercrimes. Design/methodology/approach Data for this paper are extracted from the Consumer Sentinel Network Data Handbook covering a period of 13 years. Using the raw data, the occurrences were plotted and trends (number of cycles, time between cycles, and leading state and lagging states) were identified. Descriptive statistics covering the 13 years were examined and discussed. Using 20002 as the base year, the rate of growth of each of the states were ranked annually and were tested for stability and predictability using non-parametric approaches. Findings The key findings are indigenous to the occurrences of online fraud complaints in the USA. However, as the leading nation with the best database on fraud complaints, the findings are mission critical to fraud prevention across the globe. Specifically, this study found that since 2002, there have been four distinct cycles. Each cycle is clearly noticeable because there is a rapid growth in the number of crime complaints in the beginning half of the period followed by a slowing down period. However, the speed of change from one cycle to the next is steeper and the time gap is faster. While it is true that from the perspective of all the 50 states, the ranks appear to change every year and thus are not stable. However, the majority of the changes are relatively small so their relative positions by rank are still predictable. Originality/value The paper extends existing understanding of online fraud occurrences in the USA. The findings are timely and based on longitudinal data that span over a decade. The four new cycles identified are critical to the body of knowledge. The observed change in time from one cycle to another and its changes from a mathematic to a geometric one are also new. The findings are invaluable to persons working in law enforcement related occupations (auditors, lawyers, forensic experts, among others) and who must deal with the increasing problem of online fraud and cybercrimes.

We study the impact of network information for social security fraud detection. In a social security system, companies have to pay taxes to the government. This study aims to identify those companies that intentionally go bankrupt to avoid contributing their taxes. We link companies to each other through their shared resources, because some resources are the instigators of fraud. We introduce GOTCHA!, a new approach to define and extract features from a time-weighted network and to exploit and integrate network-based and intrinsic features in fraud detection. The GOTCHA! propagation algorithm diffuses fraud through the network, labeling the unknown and anticipating future fraud while simultaneously decaying the importance of past fraud. We find that domain-driven network variables have a significant impact on detecting past and future frauds and improve the baseline by detecting up to 55% additional fraudsters over time. This paper was accepted by Lorin Hitt, information systems.

This paper analyzes internet banking fraud alertness to the general public by the South African banking institutions. The study is centered on routine activity theory, which is a criminology theory. A qualitative content analysis was used as the research technique for the interpretation of the text data from each bank’s website through the systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns to provide an in-depth understanding of internet banking fraud alertness in the banking sector. A sample size of 13 out of 16 locally and foreign controlled retail banks in South Africa was used. The findings report that banks are not adequately providing internet fraud alertness information to the general public on their websites notwithstanding that most banks they do provide such information to log-in users and the use of that information is doubtful. This study suggests a need to augment internet banking fraud alertness information and passably inform internet banking users of the types of internet banking fraud perpetrated by internet fraudsters before they log-in for transacting. Considering the current and widespread quandary of internet banking fraud, the information of this paper is important for internet banking users to improve their aptitude in identifying fraudulent schemes and circumvent them, and for the banking institutions to invest more in the provision of internet banking fraud information to the general public.

Internet banking is gaining popularity in Malaysia due to its convenience which is achieved by unique business interactions between banking institutions and customers via websites and mobile applications. However, the incredible escalation of internet fraud cases has caused increased privacy and security risks for internet banking customers. Based on a review of literature, this paper developed a research framework to gauge the impact of customer perception about the effectiveness of biometrics technology on perceived privacy and security and its influence on trust and intention to continue internet banking. In light of the growing viability of biometrics technology as a solution for internet banking issues, the developed framework is then used to assess whether perceptions of biometrics effectiveness for internet banking has significant impact on the relationship between trust and perceptions of privacy as well as security. By testing the framework using a sample of 413 internet banking users, this study offers significant insights into the potential effectiveness of biometrics technology application in an internet banking context to alleviate privacy and security concerns and improve trust among Malaysian customers. The findings revealed that although there was an insignificant relationship between perceived privacy and trust, perceived biometrics effectiveness significantly influenced the strength of the relationships between both perceived privacy and perceived security with trust.

Purpose With growing dependency on social media for reportage, coupled with rising media errors with potential to threatening the boundaries of knowledge and reliable information, attention is now being drawn to credibility of using social media and other media outlet. This increasing attention is because of the apparent disorderliness in the information milieu as a result of powerlessness to regulate activities on social media coupled with the dilemma of tampering with fundamental right of individual to free speech. Unlike the traditional media houses with specific address and location, identifying the whereabouts of promoters of fake news is challenging as information can be manufactured at the remote locality and the consequence will be felt in all the four compass points of the world. Tracking down individuals peddling fake news for charges of slander, defamation or libel is difficult, as a result of the intercontinental nature of the social network. Design/methodology/approach This study used a qualitative research design, which is guided by the interpretive paradigm because it relies comprehensively on practical methods of content analysis in which concepts are discussed to convey an in-depth understanding of the topic being investigated and bringing new knowledge. Findings Ensuring that the citizenry is adequately information literate is sine qua non for reducing the threats posed by fake news access and use to the barest minimum. Ibenne (2016) notes that becoming information literate is a process that leads to empowerment of the individual to take rationally elevated decisions in information use and knowledge application. The authors may therefore conclude that falling prey to fake news plays majorly on ignorance among the citizenry, and on the other hand, irrational use of information. When citizens possess functional information literacy, they are able to subject the information they receive to critical evaluation to eliminate the undesirable, which fake news squarely fall under. Originality/value This paper sheds light on assessing the fake news infodemic as information disorder and a threat to reliable information access and use; therefore, information acquired from this study is imaginative and valuable to better understand how information professionals react to official and personal engagement.

The rapid development of the online social media and its application has enabled people to share interests and activities, through the Internet using online social platforms. The enormous sharing of information in the media has enabled hackers to steal personal information about the user. This calls for improved schemes capable of mitigating Internet fraud, privacy leak, dissemination of rumors, etc. The unawareness that exists in the peers related to the risk associated with uploading sensitive information paves way for cyber conspirators to prey on personal information. Failure to apply security policies will easily compromise the social stature of the individual. The paper proposes a security framework SRR (Secure Request, Response) to classify the trust/distrust relationship in the online social network.

Account takeover is a form of online identity theft where a fraudster gains unauthorized access to an individual's account in a given system. Depending on the system, this unauthorized access can lead to severe consequences of privacy breach and financial loss to the victims, to the companies that maintain the system and to other users. In this paper, we present the work done in order to prevent and detect account takeovers at mobile.de, an online vehicle marketplace. To tackle the prevention problem, we first present a behavioral analysis of how fraudsters operate, and implemented a mutual two-factor authentication that achieved a reduction of 43% of account takeovers. To tackle the detection problem, we introduce a concept drift sensitive machine learning training approach that was able to improve our baseline methods by 18% in detection rates. The automatic detection reduced the exposure of fraudulent listings by 69%, resulting in a safer marketplace for buyers and sellers.

Illicit traffic monetization is a type of Internet fraud that hijacks users' web requests and reroutes them to a traffic network (e.g., advertising network), in order to unethically gain monetary rewards. Despite its popularity among Internet fraudsters, our understanding of the problem is still limited. Since the behavior is highly dynamic (can happen at any place including client-side, transport-layer and server-side) and selective (could target a regional network), prior approaches like active probing can only reveal a small piece of the entire ecosystem. So far, questions including how this fraud works at a global scale and what fraudsters' preferred methods are, still remain unanswered. To fill the missing pieces, we developed TraffickStop the first system that can detect this fraud passively. Our key contribution is a novel algorithm that works on large-scale DNS logs and efficiently discovers abnormal domain correlations. TraffickStop enables the first landscape study of this fraud, and we have some interesting findings. By analyzing over 231 billion DNS logs of two weeks, we discovered 1,457 fraud sites. Regarding its scale, the fraud sites receive more than 53 billion DNS requests within one year, and a company could lose up to 53K dollars per day due to fraud traffic. We also discovered two new strategies that are leveraged by fraudsters to evade inspection. Our work provides new insights into illicit traffic monetization, raises its public awareness, and contributes to a better understanding and ultimate elimination of this threat.

The great revitalization of information and communication technologies has facilitated broad connectivity to the Internet. However, this convenience in terms of connectivity comes with costly caveats, including internet fraud, information damage or theft, and cybersecurity issues. Most individuals rely on anti-virus software for protection. This anti-virus software has long been a foe to malware authors, but there are brief moments when new techniques slip through the cracks, and even the most sophisticated engines sometimes fail. A new tool, namely Metasploits new evasion modules, claims to exploit that. In this study, we compare and evaluate legacy evasion techniques with the novel tactics presented by Metasploits lead researcher Wei Chen. We consider the benefits and pitfalls of each technique and evaluate the new modules successes (or failures!).

Compared with traditional fraud, Internet frauds have many characteristics, such as lots of methods, strong concealment, strong penetration and wide harm. In the recent years, more and more fraud cases occurred continuously, analysis of various fraud cases that have emerged is of great significance in preventing fraud. The fraud cases involve different crowds, platforms, software, purpose, etc. There are similarities and differences between cases. The optimization case is conducive to improving the anti-internet fraud education effect and improving anti-internet technology. Knowledge graph has advantages in reflecting the structure of knowledge relationship. This paper uses the knowledge graph to organize the correlation between internet fraud cases and the relevance of knowledge points within the case, propose a Knowledge Graph Case Teaching (KGCT) model to optimize the internet fraud case teaching, and select the most relevant cases for different crowd to strengthen crowd's awareness of anti-internet fraud.

Information and Communication Technology ICT and Traditional African Religion TAR (Voodoo/Vodou) promote the integration of socio-cultural, political and economic system of the people in Africa. However, the youth, (Sakawa Boys) merge technology with religion to commit internet fraud. Sakawa is the use of evil occult powers to commit internet fraud by possessing the mind of the foreign cyber target. These Sakawa boys manipulate vodou powers by performing certain frightening rituals for spiritual empowerment before logging into the internet. This has brought different changes to the socio-cultural and ideological bases of Ghanaians. This study reviewed literature on the causal factors, their modus operandi and the consequences of technology human interaction in Ghana. The Internet and Vodou rituals are found to be the major driving force for Sakawa boys to practice their trade. The consequences of the activities of these boys included infertility, mental illness, sickness or death for the perpetrators and the victims of their ritual sacrifices. Based on traditional ethos, this has transformed the preferences and social values of the youth in Ghana.

The moment of returning to Nigeria is a significant motif in the literature of the Nigerian diaspora. This chapter examines the diverging attitudes towards Nigeria in Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005). While Atta’s novel evinces an attitude of nation building and of trying to improve the country, Cole’s book presents a detached visitor and observer who highlights the more negative aspects of the Nigerian imaginary. As he is confronted with Nigeria’s rampant problems and social ills, the novel introduces three sets of problems that are saliently depicted in Nigerian diaspora literature, namely the lack of consistent provision of electricity, the ubiquitous corruption, and the proliferation of internet fraud.

Исследуются наиболее распространенные способы совершения мошенничеств в сфере информационно-телекоммуникационных технологий; даются авторские предложения по их классификации., The article is devoted to the study of the most common exams of fraud in the sphere of information and telecommunication technologies and contains author’s proposals on their classification.

Part 4: Security, Privacy, Ethics and Misinformation; International audience; Internet fraud has become a global problem attracting the attention of researchers, practitioners and policy makers. Existing empirical theoretical studies on internet crimes have mostly used neutralization and deterrence theories. Despite the insights from these theories, we are still observing an increase in the number of internet crimes. We argue that Denial of Risk theory may provide new insights on internet crimes such as internet fraud. We examined how each of the three dimensions of Denial of Risk theory (scapegoating, self-confidence and comparing of risk) serve as antecedent of the intention to commit internet fraud. Using responses from 350 individuals from internet fraud hotspots, we showed that scapegoating, self-confidence and comparing of risk are positively related to intention to commit internet fraud. The study offers theoretical and practical contributions to research in the spectrum of internet fraud and the theoretical application of denial of risk in cybercrime research.

Issues relating to cybersecurity and its challenges in Nigeria can be traced as far back as the provision of Internet services to Nigerians in 1996. Nigerians are known for the huge frauds they commit using the Internet. This chapter treats cybersecurity challenges/conflicts history in Nigeria. Furthermore, it looks at the relevant laws guiding against cyber crimes in Nigeria. Lastly, the need for embracing cybersecurity and mobile device forensics is encouraged.

Despite the computers have developed rapidly in recent years, there are still many difficulties to obtain a large number of labelled data in many practical problems, for example, medical image diagnosis, internet fraud, and pedestrian detection. To deal with learning problems with only a few labeled data, a novel semi-supervised learning method combined with dynamic graph learning with self-paced learning mechanism is present in this work, namely SS-GSELM. Firstly, according to the loss value of labeled samples in each training, the algorithm selects the sample with the smaller loss value for learning, and then gradually adds the sample with the larger loss value during the training process until all labeled samples are trained. In particular, different weights are given to samples through a regularization function to adjust the importance of different samples on the model results. Secondly, the algorithm uses local consistency property as supplementary information to enhance the performance of the learning machine, so an adaptive graph matrix is constructed to retain data similarity information. To do this, an alternative strategy is proposed to update graph matrices and self-paced weights to adapt to the classifier. Experimental results on real data sets exhibit that the proposed method superior to the classic methods in classification tasks.

The world of marketing has changed through the incorporation of electronic means through which new customers and new markets can be reached. As a result, the world of trade and commerce has been revolutionized, revealing new and sometimes less scrupulous ways of dealing in an online marketplace. The article provides three Australian examples (each featuring a nexus between e-marketing and fraudulent online transactions) in order to gain a deeper appreciation of the darker side that exists to e-marketing. It also explores education and adult learning as means of raising awareness and skills in dealing with harmful e-marketing practices found in occurrences such as Internet fraud.

Crowdfunding platforms offer founders the possibility to collect funding for project realization. With the advent of these platforms, the risk of fraud has risen. Fraudulent founders provide inaccurate information or pretend interest toward a project. Within this study, we propose deception detection support mechanisms to address this novel type of Internet fraud. We analyze a sample of fraudulent and nonfraudulent projects published at a leading crowdfunding platform. We examine whether the analysis of dynamic communication during the funding period is valuable for identifying fraudulent behavior—apart from analyzing only the static information related to the project. We investigate whether content-based cues and linguistic cues are valuable for fraud detection. The selection of cues and the subsequent feature engineering is based on theories in areas of communication, psychology, and computational linguistics. Our results should be helpful to the stakeholders of crowdfunding platforms and resear...

The cyber world provides new information and online social activities. However, frequent social activities and inappropriate physical and mental behaviors (e.g., cyber bullying, cyber pornography, and Internet fraud) may affect physical and mental health of individuals. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of cyber bullying, cyber pornography, and Internet fraud adolescents’ physical and mental health and examine the moderating effect of Internet addiction among Taiwan adolescents aged 15 to 18 years using a nationally representative dataset. Data from 8480 adolescents (4184 boys, 4296 girls) from 150 high schools were analyzed. The results indicated that cyber bullying, cyber pornography and Internet addiction present significant positive effects on physical and mental health of individuals; Internet addiction has a significant moderating effect on the relationships among cyber bullying, cyber pornography, and physical and mental health of individuals. The results of this study suggest that parents and teachers should pay more attention to adolescents, especially those who have frequently reported seeing cyber bullying, and provide counseling, help as well as assistance on the proper use of the Internet. Adolescents who are addicted to cyber pornography should be encouraged to develop other interests and participate in outdoor activities to ensure healthy physical and mental health.