A Real-Time Monitoring Framework for Online Auctions Frauds

In spite of many advantages of online auctioning, serious frauds menace the auction users' interests. Today, monitoring auctions for frauds is becoming very crucial. We propose here a generic framework that covers real-time monitoring of multiple live auctions. The monitoring is performed at different auction times depending on fraud types and auction duration. We divide the real-time monitoring functionality into threefold: detecting frauds, reacting to frauds, and updating bidders' clusters. The first task examines in run-time bidding activities in ongoing auctions by applying fraud detection mechanisms. The second one determines how to react to suspicious activities by taking appropriate run-time actions against the fraudsters and infected auctions. Finally, every time an auction ends, successfully or unsuccessfully, participants' fraud scores and their clusters are updated dynamically. Through simulated auction data, we conduct an experiment to monitor live auctions for shill bidding. The latter is considered the most severe fraud in online auctions, and the most difficult to detect. More precisely, we monitor each live auction at three time points, and for each of them, we verify the shill patterns that most likely happen.