Unsupervised Profiling Methods for Fraud Detection

Credit card fraud falls broadly into two categories: behavioural fraud and application fraud. Application fraud occurs when individuals obtain new credit cards from issuing companies using false personal information and then spend as much as possible in a short space of time. However, most credit card fraud is behavioural and occurs when details of legitimate cards have been obtained fraudulently and sales are made on a 'Cardholder Not Present' basis. These sales include telephone sales and e-commerce transactions where only the card details are required. In this paper, we are concerned with detecting behavioural fraud through the analysis of longitudinal data. These data usually consist of credit card transactions over time, but can include other variables, both static and longitudinal. Statistical methods for fraud detection are often classification (supervised) methods that discriminate between known fraudulent and non-fraudulent transactions; however, these methods rely on accurate identification of fraudulent transactions in historical databases – information that is often in short supply or non-existent. We are particularly interested in unsupervised methods that do not use this information but instead detect changes in behaviour or unusual transactions. We discuss two methods for unsupervised fraud detection in credit data in this paper and apply them to some real data sets. Peer group analysis is a new tool for monitoring behaviour over time in data mining situations. In particular, the tool detects individual accounts that begin to behave in a way distinct from accounts to which they had previously been similar. Each account is selected as a target account and is compared with all other accounts in the database, using either external comparison criteria or internal criteria summarizing earlier behaviour patterns of each account. Based on this comparison, a peer group of accounts most similar to the target account is chosen. The behaviour of the peer group is then summarized at each subsequent time point, and the behaviour of the target account compared with the summary of its peer group. Those target accounts exhibiting behaviour most different from their peer group summary behaviour are flagged as meriting closer investigation. Break point analysis is a tool that identifies changes in spending behaviour based on the transaction information in a single account. Recent transactions are compared with previous spending behaviour to detect features such as rapid spending and an increase in the level of spending, features that would not necessarily be captured by outlier detection. Introduction In the fight against fraud, actions fall under two broad categories: fraud prevention and fraud detection. Fraud prevention describes measures to stop fraud occurring in the first place. These include PINs for bankcards, Internet security systems for credit card transactions and passwords on telephone bank accounts. In contrast, fraud detection involves identifying fraud as quickly as possible once it has been perpetrated. We apply fraud detection once fraud prevention has failed, using detection methods continuously, as we will usually be unaware that fraud prevention has failed. In this article we are concerned solely with fraud detection. Fraud detection must evolve continuously. Once criminals realise that a certain mode of fraudulent behaviour can be detected, they will adapt their strategies and try others. Of course, new criminals are also attempting to commit fraud and many of these will not be aware of the fraud detection methods that have been successful in the past, and will adopt strategies that lead to identifiable frauds. This means that the earlier detection tools need to be applied as well as the latest developments. Statistical fraud detection methods may be ‘supervised’ or ‘unsupervised’. In supervised methods, models are trained to discriminate between fraudulent and non-fraudulent behaviour, so that new observations can be assigned to classes so as to optimise some measure of classification performance. Of course, this requires one to be confident about the true classes of the original data used to build the models; uncertainty is introduced when legitimate transactions are mistakenly reported as fraud or when fraudulent observations are not identified as such. Supervised methods require that we have examples of both classes, and they can only be used to detect frauds of a type that have previously occurred. These methods also suffer from the problem of unbalanced class sizes: in fraud detection problems, the legitimate transactions generally far outnumber the fraudulent ones and this imbalance can cause misspecification of models. Brause et al (1999) say that, in their database of credit card transactions, ‘the probability of fraud is very low (0.2%) and has been lowered in a preprocessing step by a conventional fraud detecting system down to 0.1%. ’ Hassibi (2000) remarks ‘Out of some 12 billion transactions made annually, approximately 10 million – or one out of every 1200 transactions – turn out to be fraudulent. ’ In contrast, unsupervised methods simply seek those accounts, customers, etc. whose behaviour is ‘unusual’. We model a baseline distribution that represents normal behaviour and then attempt to detect observations that show greatest departure from this norm. These can then be examined more closely. Outliers are a basic form of nonstandard observation that can be used for fraud detection. This leads us to note the fundamental point that we can seldom be certain, by statistical analysis alone, that a fraud has been perpetrated. Rather, the analysis should be regarded as alerting us to the fact that an observation is anomalous, or more likely to be fraudulent than others – so that it can then be investigated in more detail. One can think of the objective of the statistical analysis as being to return a suspicion score (where we will regard a higher score as more suspicious than a lower one). The higher the score is, then the more unusual is the observation, or the more like previously fraudulent values it is. The fact that there are many different ways in which fraud can be perpetrated, and many different scenarios in which it can occur, means that there are many different ways of computing suspicion scores. We can compute suspicion scores for each account in the database, and these scores can be updated as time progresses. By ordering accounts according to their suspicion score, we can focus attention on those with the highest scores, or on those that exhibit a sudden increase in suspicion score. If we have a limited budget, so that we can only afford to investigate a certain number of accounts or records, we can concentrate investigation on those thought to be most likely to be fraudulent. Credit Card Fraud Credit card fraud is perpetrated in various ways but can be broadly categorised as application, ‘missing in post’, stolen/lost card, counterfeit card and ‘cardholder not present’ fraud. Application fraud arises when individuals obtain new credit cards from issuing companies using false personal information; application fraud totalled £10.2 million in 2000 (Source: APACS) and is the only type of fraud that actually declined between 1999 and 2000. ‘Missing in post’ (£17.3m in 2000) describes the interception of credit cards in the post by fraudsters before they reach the cardholder. Stolen or lost cards accounted for £98.9 million in fraud in 2000, but the greatest percentage increases between 1999 and 2000 were in counterfeit card fraud (£50.3m to £102.8m) and ‘cardholder not present’ (i.e. postal, phone, internet transactions) fraud (£29.3m to £56.8m). To commit these last two types of fraud it is necessary to obtain the details of the card without the cardholder’s knowledge. This is done in various ways, including employees using an unauthorised ‘swiper’ that downloads the encoded information onto a laptop computer and hackers obtaining credit card details by intrusion into companies’ computer networks. A counterfeit card is then made, or the card details simply used for phone, postal or Internet transactions. Supervised methods to detect fraudulent transactions can be used to discriminate between those accounts or transactions known to be fraudulent and those known (or at least presumed) to be legitimate. For example, traditional credit scorecards (Hand and Henley, 1997) are used to detect customers who are likely to default, and the reasons for this may include fraud. Such scorecards are based on the details given on the application forms, and perhaps also on other details, such as bureau information. Classification techniques, such as statistical discriminant analysis and neural networks, can be used to discriminate between fraudulent and non-fraudulent transactions to give transactions a suspicion score. However, information about fraudulent transactions may not be available and in these cases we apply unsupervised methods to attempt to detect fraud. These methods are scarce in the literature and are less popular than supervised methods in practice as suspicion scores reflect a propensity to act anomalously when compared with previous behaviour. This is different to suspicion scores obtained using supervised techniques, which are guided to reflect a propensity to commit fraud in a manner already previously discovered. The idea behind suspicion scores from unsupervised methods is that unusual behaviour or transactions can often be indicators of fraud. An advantage of using unsupervised methods over supervised methods is that previously undiscovered types of fraud may be detected. Supervised methods are only trained to discriminate between legitimate transactions and previously known fraud. Unsupervised methods and their application to fraud detection As we mentioned above, the emphasis on fraud detection methodology is with supervised techniques. In particular, neural networks