Microsoft Researchers Slash Skype Fraud By 68%

mask.of.sanity writes "Life could become more difficult for fraudsters on Skype thanks to new research by Microsoft boffins that promises to cut down on fake accounts across the platform. The research (PDF) combined information from diverse sources including a user's profile, activities, and social connections into a supervised machine learning environment that could automate the presently manual tasks of fraud detection. The results show the framework boosted fraud detection rates for particular account types by 68 per cent with a 5 per cent false positive rate."

Comments

BAD MATH!

[CapOblivious2010]

Improving detection by 68% != Reducing fraud by 68%

Imagine that previous methods caught 10% of the fraudulent accounts. New tech improves that to 16.8%. It's a 68% improvement in the fraud detection rate, but only a 6.8% "slashing" of the fraudulent accounts.

(And 5% false positives is pretty horrific)

Don't want a legitimate account

[Jack Griffin]

90% of my online accounts are fake, even this one. I create new accounts with new names to preserve my privacy, I have multiple hotmail, gmail and Facebook accounts specifically for this purpose. Sure the NSA types might see through this, but the average marketing agency won't. In real life, you can separate your worlds. My wife's circle of friends know me, but they don't know my friends, same goes for work 'mates', extended family etc. I have the power to keep things separate. It seems this choice is being slowly removed in online life as every web service demands you use your real name. Who wants to live in a world where everyone knows everything? We need a right to anonymity online.