Shopify Inc.
COMPUTER-IMPLEMENTED SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR DETECTING FRAUDULENT ACTIVITY

Abstract:

An e-commerce platform may be subject to fraudulent activity. In some embodiments, a graph is used to represent the connection between users of the e-commerce platform. The graph may be built and maintained using a belief propagation algorithm. The graph may be used to assign, to each user, the probability that the user is fraudulent. In some embodiments, the use of the graph and updating the graph are two independent operations: one performed in real-time, and the other performed offline. In some embodiments, additional information may be requested from a user if the user is assigned a high probability of being fraudulent, in order to try to better determine whether or not the user is a fraudulent user. The embodiments are not limited to an e-commerce platform, but may generally apply to any computer system in which there is a desire to detect fraudulent activity.