Combating Shill Bidding in Real Time: Prevention, Detection and Response

Human cheating has been a barrier to establishing trust among e-commerce users, throughout the last two decades. In particular, in online auctions, since all the transactions occur among anonymous users, trust is difficult to establish and maintain. Shill bidding happens when bidders bid exclusively to inflate (in forward auctions) or deflate (in reverse auctions) prices in online auctions. At present, shill bidding is the most severe and persistent form of cheating in online auctions, but still there are only a few or no established techniques for shill defense at run-time. In this paper, I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches to combating shill bidding. I also propose the ShillFree1 auction system to secure and protect auction systems from shill bidders for both forward and reverse auctions. More precisely, by using a variety of bidding behavior and user history, proposed auction system prevents, monitors and detects shill activities in real time. Moreover, to detect shilling thoroughly I propose IP tracking techniques. The system also takes necessary actions against shill activities at run-time. The experimental results demonstrate that, by prevention, detection and response mechanisms, the proposed auction system keeps the auction users secured from shill bidding and therefore establishes trust among online auction users.