At Strata (O'Reilly's BigData conference), there was an entire session track dedicated to fraud prevention and legal movement on this type of stuff. Although, you will never be able to stop this (unless you stop people from being driven by money) the data community is taking this kind of detection very seriously. Every business, if it get large enough, is going to care about this type of fraud, if only to pay it some amount of lip service
I saw a presentation. From a data scientist at bitly. She showed that spammer links have a distinctive traffic shape (constant over time) while real links have a totally different one (initial peak followed by logarithmic drop to zero). Similar patterns exist in advertising campaigns. 6MM/month seems like a lot of breakage that someone is fine cutting that check.
What's to stop a botnet operator from incorporating that data scientist's findings into their bot behavior? It's a chicken & egg problem, and it will hopefully lead to a better alternative to online advertising (perhaps something more user-centric).
There will always be an incentive to commit fraud as long as there's money to be made. Why doesn't a robber of houses move to a new city each time they commit a crime? There are costs to all crime, especially in the setup. If you raise the input cost to generate a reward, then you make it less attractive as an avenue to fraud. At least among the unskilled criminals.
I'll totally admit I'm skewed by operating on the data side and want to believe that my work has some lasting positive impact, and isn't a band-aid.
Comments
At Strata (O'Reilly's BigData conference), there was an entire session track dedicated to fraud prevention and legal movement on this type of stuff. Although, you will never be able to stop this (unless you stop people from being driven by money) the data community is taking this kind of detection very seriously. Every business, if it get large enough, is going to care about this type of fraud, if only to pay it some amount of lip service
I saw a presentation. From a data scientist at bitly. She showed that spammer links have a distinctive traffic shape (constant over time) while real links have a totally different one (initial peak followed by logarithmic drop to zero). Similar patterns exist in advertising campaigns. 6MM/month seems like a lot of breakage that someone is fine cutting that check.
What's to stop a botnet operator from incorporating that data scientist's findings into their bot behavior? It's a chicken & egg problem, and it will hopefully lead to a better alternative to online advertising (perhaps something more user-centric).
> It's a chicken & egg problem
I think you mean it's an arms race. Arms races are good markets to be in as the hash-checking AV companies have proved.
There will always be an incentive to commit fraud as long as there's money to be made. Why doesn't a robber of houses move to a new city each time they commit a crime? There are costs to all crime, especially in the setup. If you raise the input cost to generate a reward, then you make it less attractive as an avenue to fraud. At least among the unskilled criminals.
I'll totally admit I'm skewed by operating on the data side and want to believe that my work has some lasting positive impact, and isn't a band-aid.