Technologies to Defeat Fraudulent Schemes Related to Email Requests
Edoardo M. Airoldi, Bradley Malin, Latanya Sweeney · 2005
Online criminals have adapted traditional snail mail and door-to-door fraudulent schemes into electronic form. Increasingly, such schemes target an individual's personal e-mail, where they mingle among, and are masked by, honest communications. The targeting and conniving nature of these schemes are an infringement upon an individual's personal privacy, as well as a threat to personal safety. We argue that state-of-the-art spam filtering systems fail to capture fraudulent intent hidden in the text of e-mails, but demonstrate how more robust systems can be engineered starting from existing AI tools. We illustrate how to design a learning system capable of accurately identifying the fraudulent indent within an e-mail in order to tackle, for example, the advance fee fraud scam. Further, we propose