Analysis of Fraudulent Activity in a Brazilian Auction Site

Online auction fraud is the most common complaint according to Internet Crime and Complaint Center. Despite that, there are not many published empirical studies about fraud occurrence in online auction sites, and the existing ones mostly target eBay. This lack of research is even worse in Latin American countries. In this paper we present the results of an exploratory research on fraud occurrence in MercadoLivre, the biggest Brazilian auction site, which suggest that non-delivery fraud is a real, recurrent and measurable problem.