5.5m US households experience identity theft each year

 "New consumer research from Parks Associates finds 5% of US broadband households annually experience identity theft, which equates to 5.5 million households affected and at least 6.6 million people. Identity theft ranks as the top data security or privacy concern, cited by over half of all US broadband households."

Source:  Parks Associates, 30th September 2020

eBay's algorithms can identify 40% of credit card fraud transactions

"eBay scientists have published a report which says that it’s new AI algorithm can identify 40% of credit card fraud transactions with high precision. A significant finding for a sector which solely relies on technology for fraud detection.
As always there are two sides of the coin for any entity or method. In fraud detection also, the techniques and tools can either focus on good actors or bad actors. Till now it has been the former. Where the truth is that majority of transactions conducted are by good actors. So it was imperative to study the behaviour of good actors, in fact much more important than those of bad actors.
Hence eBay, rather than focusing on the changing patterns employed by bad actors to circumvent protective barriers, they decided to instead analyses instances of good behaviour.
San Jose-based eBay scientists Utkarsh Porwal and Smruthi Mukund noted that patterns of good behaviour do not change with time. The data points that represent this form of conduct have consistent spatial arrangements. Porwal and Mukund suggested a clustering method for identifying outliers and to later formulate a score, which would determine consistency and in turn, good behaviour."

Source:  Next Big What, 14th November 2018

Facebook deleted nearly 1.3bn fake accounts in 6 months

"Facebook disabled nearly 1.3 billion “fake” accounts over the past two quarters, many of them bots “with the intent of spreading spam or conducting illicit activities such as scams,” the company said on Monday.
Facebook disabled 583 million accounts in Q1 2018, down from 694 million accounts in Q4 of last year, a decrease the company attributes to its “variability of our detection technology’s ability to find and flag them.”
Most of the accounts “were disabled within minutes of registration,” Facebook claimed in a blog post, but Facebook doesn’t catch all fake accounts. The company estimates that 3 percent to 4 percent of its monthly active users are “fake,” up from 2 percent to 3 percent in Q3 of 2017, according to filings documents.
Those numbers are big, a reminder of what Facebook is up against just 18 months after it was learned that a Russian troll farm used Facebook to try and influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Facebook says it finds most of the accounts on its own using software algorithms, but a small percentage — about 1.5 percent of the disabled accounts — were discovered after they were flagged by Facebook."
Source:  Recode, 15th May 2018
Note - This seems to be just on Facebook, and not on Instagram or WhatsApp (it's only Facebook that insists on a real identity)

Publishers are losing millions of dollars a day due to fraudulent inventory

"A new study has found massive volumes of counterfeit inventory across global display and video exchanges. The study, which was conducted by a partnership of 16 leading programmatic publishers across 26 domains, found that the record levels of fraud were resulting in lost revenues of up to $1.27bn per year.
With the participation of DSPs including Amobee, Quantcast and Google, the publishers examined the total available inventory across all exchanges for the 26 domains, and found video callouts were overstated by as much as 57 times the available inventory, representing around 700m counterfeit callouts per day. For display advertising, inventory was overstated by four times, with daily counterfeit callouts in the billions.
The publishers involved included Business Insider, The LA Times, Mail Online, The New York Times, Turner, USA Today, The Washington Post and Watson Advertising. In an effort to combat such high levels of fraud, the firms have thrown their support behind the IAB’s Ads.txt initiative, which aims to provide a standard way of authorising inventory.
“The results of this study confirm that Ads.txt needs to be adopted as rapidly as possible to cut off the flow of counterfeit website inventory,” said Dennis Buchheim, senior vice president and general manager at IAB Tech Lab. “It is critical that the industry comes together to put a stop to criminal activity and secure the health of the supply chain.”
Counterfeit impressions are created when a bad seller replaces the URL of a low quality site with a premium publisher URL, or a fraudster creates fake impressions and labels them with a high quality publisher’s URK. This fake inventory is then sold on multiple exchanges and SSPs, without the knowledge of the publishers they are impersonating, to trick advertisers into thinking they are buying premium inventory. The process robs premium publishers of revenues, and tricks advertisers into buying mislabelled and potentially unsafe inventory."

Source:  Mobile Marketing, 12th December 2017