Detecting Fraudulent Behavior on Crowdfunding Platforms: The Role of Linguistic and Content-Based Cues in Static and Dynamic Contexts

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Siering, Michael; Koch, Jascha-Alexander; Deokar, Amit V.
• 署名单位: Goethe University Frankfurt; University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Lowell
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0742-1222
• DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2016.1205930
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 421-455
• 关键词: interpersonal deception; knowledge discovery; MEDIA RICHNESS

摘要

Crowdfunding platforms offer founders the possibility to collect funding for project realization. With the advent of these platforms, the risk of fraud has risen. Fraudulent founders provide inaccurate information or pretend interest toward a project. Within this study, we propose deception detection support mechanisms to address this novel type of Internet fraud. We analyze a sample of fraudulent and nonfraudulent projects published at a leading crowdfunding platform. We examine whether the analysis of dynamic communication during the funding period is valuable for identifying fraudulent behavior-apart from analyzing only the static information related to the project. We investigate whether content-based cues and linguistic cues are valuable for fraud detection. The selection of cues and the subsequent feature engineering is based on theories in areas of communication, psychology, and computational linguistics. Our results should be helpful to the stakeholders of crowdfunding platforms and researchers of fraud detection.