Financial Fraud Detection on Social Networks Based on a Data Mining Approach

Abstract

The article summarizes the arguments and counter-arguments within the scientific debate on the issue of researching financial frauds in the Internet. The main goal of the research is to develop methodological principles for identifying financial cyber fraud in social networks based on the analysis of comments to identify relevant text patterns that may indicate manipulation attempts and further fraud. The urgency of solving this scientific problem is due to the fact that the mass involvement of Internet users in social interactions in the virtual environment has contributed to the development of various criminal schemes, as well as personal data that is initially entered during registration and information that is published in social networks can be used by a fraudster to carry out illegal financial transactions. The study of the issue of identifying financial fraud in social networks in the article is carried out in the following logical sequence: collecting comments with a corresponding request under publications in the social network using the Instaloader tool; combining comments into groups based on content similarity; conducting preliminary processing of text data (decomposing the text into simpler components (tokens) and reducing similar word forms to their main dictionary form); determination of the level of similarity of text data using the cosine of similarity; building clusters of text data that can indicate the presence of signs of financial fraud under relevant comments in social networks. Instagram was chosen to identify fraudulent operations in social networks. The analysis of comments on the social network Instagram to identify text patterns showed that offers and appeals from specific groups of people and promoted in comments with the help of spam are dangerous. Based on the results of the study, it was concluded that national regulators need to strengthen public control of the Internet, as well as improve the security system at the technical level by using the latest machine learning methods to identify attempts to commit illegal actions with the subsequent imposition of sanctions on such users in social networks.