Liar Buyer Fraud, and How to Curb It
June 21, 2016
Expert Witness Markus Jakobsson, Hossein Siadati and Mayank Dhiman describe a common but poorly known type of fraud – so-called liar buyer fraud – and explain why traditional anti-fraud technology has failed to curb this problem. They then introduce a counter-intuitive technique based on user interface modification to address liar-buyer fraud, and report result of experiments supporting that their technique has the potential of dramatically reducing fraud losses. They used a combination of role playing and questionnaires to determine the behavior and opinions of about 1700 subjects, and found that their proposed technique results in a statistically significant reduction of fraud rates for both men and women in an experimental setting. Their approach has not yet been tested on real e-commerce traffic, but appears sufficiently promising to do that. Their findings also support that men are more willing to lie and defraud than women are; but maybe more interestingly, their analysis shows that the technique they introduce make men as honest as women.