Behavioral Analysis of Review Fraud: Linking Malicious Crowdsourcing to Amazon and Beyond Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • We exploit the prevalence of malicious review writers on crowdsourcing platforms like RapidWorkers to identify actual fraud reviews on Amazon. Complementary to previous efforts which often rely on proxies for fraud reviews, we present a long-term study of actual fraudulent behaviors in online review manipulation. We find that these malicious reviewers though often providing seemingly legitimate opinions do exhibit significant differences from normal reviewers in terms of ratings distribution, length of the reviews, and the burstiness of the reviews themselves. We additionally study the evolution of these reviews, and find striking temporal changes that could support future discovery of these reviewers who may be hiding in plain sight.

name of conference

  • Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017, Montral, Qubec, Canada, May 15-18, 2017.

published proceedings

  • Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

author list (cited authors)

  • Kaghazgaran, P., Caverlee, J., & Alfifi, M.

citation count

  • 9

complete list of authors

  • Kaghazgaran, Parisa||Caverlee, James||Alfifi, Majid

publication date

  • January 2017