Finding You on the Internet: an approach for finding on-line presences of people for fraud risk analysis

Fraud risk analysis on data from formal information sources, being a ‘paper reality', suffers from blindness to false information. Moreover, the very act of providing false information is a strong indicator for fraud. The technology presented in this paper provides one step towards the vision of harnessing real-world data from social media and internet for fraud risk analysis. We introduce a novel iterative search, monitor, and match approach for finding on-line presences of people. A real-world experiment showed that Twitter accounts can be effectively found given only limited name and address data. We also present an analysis of the ethical considerations surrounding the application of such technology for fraud risk analysis