Abstract—With the growth of e-commerce, various schemes
have emerged to defraud suppliers who offer services and sell
goods over the Internet. The deferred payment system, which is
a traditional Japanese business practice whereby customers do
not pay until goods are received, facilitates online fraud. After
receiving goods, fraudulent clients simply disappear and the
supplier does not receive the payment. However, since the
traditional deferred payment system is expected by honest
customers, online shopping sites cannot eliminate this payment
system, and consequently are vulnerable to this type of fraud.
The conventional approach to detect online shopping fraud is
the use of various data mining methods based on statistical
analysis. However, outbreaks of new fraudulent clients create
new samples that change the distribution of data and decrease
the performance of data-mining-based fraud detection. In this
study, we propose a new approach that does not rely primarily
on data mining. The main characteristic of the proposed
approach is the use of the nature of economic crimes. In
addition, specific implementations to detect online shopping
fraud are proposed. The application of the proposed approach
in other areas, such as spam filtering and Internet virus
detection, is also discussed.