Automated Fraudulent Phone Call Recognition through Deep Learning

Abstract

Several studies have shown that the phone number and call behavior generated by a phone call reveal the type of phone call. By analyzing the phone number rules and call behavior patterns, we can recognize the fraudulent phone call. The success of this recognition heavily depends on the particular set of features that are used to construct the classifier. Since these features are human-labor engineered, any change introduced to the telephone fraud can render these carefully constructed features ineffective. In this paper, we show that we can automate the feature engineering process and, thus, automatically recognize the fraudulent phone call by applying our proposed novel approach based on deep learning. We design and construct a new classifier based on Call Detail Records (CDR) for fraudulent phone call recognition and find that the performance achieved by our deep learning-based approach outperforms competing methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Specifically, in our accuracy evaluation, the obtained accuracy exceeds 99%, and the most performant deep learning model is 4.7% more accurate than the state-of-the-art recognition model on average. Furthermore, we show that our deep learning approach is very stable in real-world environments, and the implicit features automatically learned by our approach are far more resilient to dynamic changes of a fraudulent phone number and its call behavior over time. We conclude that the ability to automatically construct the most relevant phone number features and call behavior features and perform accurate fraudulent phone call recognition makes our deep learning-based approach a precise, efficient, and robust technique for fraudulent phone call recognition.