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Frauds in Online Social Networks: A Review

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Social Networks and Surveillance for Society

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

With the widespread use of computers, communications infrastructure, and the Internet, online social networks (OSN) have gained a huge popularity in recent years. Unfortunately, the very nature and popularity of OSN have brought about its own share of frauds and misuse. Frauds in OSN refer to activities that result in harassment, loss of money, loss of reputation of a person or an entity, loss of trust in the system or an individual, etc. Due to the complex structure, and information flow in OSN, as well as the relative anonymity of the identity, detection, control and prevention of frauds in OSN is difficult, time-consuming, error-prone and demands an unusually high level of technical finesse from the investigators. In this paper, we begin with a simple typology of OSN frauds and then follow up by describing in detail the nature of each fraud and by reviewing some of the state-of-the-art research done so far (mostly in machine learning, data mining, and text mining) to detect them. Where possible, we stress on the scale and impact of these frauds. We identify manipulation of identities and diffusion of misinformation as two important aspects in the modus operandi of most types of OSN frauds. We identify manipulation of identities and diffusion of misinformation as two important aspects in the modus operandi of most types of OSN frauds.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/24/mcdstories-when-a-hashtag-becomes-a-bashtag/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/itadact.pdf/.

  3. 3.

    http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-media/facebook-fake-accounts/.

  4. 4.

    https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/03/facebook-estimates-5-5-11-2-accounts-fake/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Pune, India

    Manoj Apte & Girish Keshav Palshikar

  2. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Sriram Baskaran

Authors
  1. Manoj Apte
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  2. Girish Keshav Palshikar
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  3. Sriram Baskaran
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Correspondence to Manoj Apte .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey

    Tansel Özyer

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Rourkela, Odisha, India

    Sambit Bakshi

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

    Reda Alhajj

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Apte, M., Palshikar, G.K., Baskaran, S. (2019). Frauds in Online Social Networks: A Review. In: Özyer, T., Bakshi, S., Alhajj, R. (eds) Social Networks and Surveillance for Society. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78256-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78256-0_1

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