Research Spotlight
Congratulations to Zhu Zhang, Hsinchun Chen, and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. (with A. Abbasi and D. Zimbra, MIS Ph.D. graduate/student), and thier paper “Detecting Fake Websites: The Contribution of Statistical Learning Theory,” which won Management Information Systems Quarterly’s best paper of 2010 award.
The authors will be presented a plaque honoring this accomplishment at the upcoming December ICIS 2011 conference in Shanghai at a special MIS Quarterly Awards luncheon.
The paper was selected by the Senior Editors of MIS Quarterly and was part of the MIS Quarterly volume 34, number 3, September, 2010 edition.
Abstract:
Fake websites have become increasingly pervasive, generating billions of dollars in fraudulent revenue at the expense of unsuspecting Internet users. The design and appearance of these websites makes it difficult for users to manually identify them as fake.
Automated detection systems have emerged as a mechanism for combating fake websites, however most are fairly simplistic in terms of their fraud cues and detection methods employed. Consequently, existing systems are susceptible to the myriad of obfuscation tactics used by fraudsters, resulting in highly ineffective fake website detection performance.
In light of these deficiencies, we propose the development of a new class of fake website detection systems that are based on statistical learning theory (SLT). Using a design science approach, a prototype system was developed to demonstrate the potential utility of this class of systems. We conducted a series of experiments, comparing the proposed system against several existing fake website detection systems on a test bed encompassing 900 websites.
The results indicate that systems grounded in SLT can more accurately detect various categories of fake websites by utilizing richer sets of fraud cues in combination with problem-specific knowledge. Given the hefty cost exacted by fake websites, the results have important implications for e-commerce and online security. View the paper here.
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