On bidder zones, cell phones and ballot stuffing

Ballot stuffing is the process of illegitimately creating a good reputation and requires a number of colluding fraudsters. With the use of an anonymising network, a single user could pose as many separate users and possibly implement the ballot stuffing scheme without the complexities of managing multiple fraudsters. In this paper we propose a framework that deals with thwarting ballot stuffing within the context of anonymising networks. The framework proposed depends on the ability to look up a single user’s physical location with a fair degree of certainty. With this mechanism in place, the framework is able to compare the locations of all users involved in a transaction. If the coordinates are within close proximity to one another (this is unlikely in a global trading system) then the transaction is tagged accordingly. The framework proposed does not necessarily apply to only thwarting ballot stuffing schemes, we discuss the fundamental problem of using anonymising networks to commit ballot stuffing and analyse another scheme (ticket scalping) that may be thwarted with this framework.