Liar Buyer Fraud, and How to Curb It

We describe a common but poorly known type of fraud – so-called liar buyer fraud – and explain why traditional anti-fraud technology has failed to curb this problem. We then introduce a counter-intuitive technique based on user interface modification to address liar-buyer fraud, and report result of experiments supporting that our technique has the potential of dramatically reducing fraud losses. We used a combination of role playing and questionnaires to determine the behavior and opinions of about 1700 subjects, and found that our proposed technique results in a statistically significant reduction of fraud rates for both men and women in an experimental setting. Our approach has not yet been tested on real e-commerce traffic, but appears sufficiently promising to do that. Our findings also support that men are more willing to lie and defraud than women are; but maybe more interestingly, our analysis shows that the technique we introduce make men as honest as women.