Title: Search Rank Fraud De-Anonymization in Online Systems,
Abstract: We introduce the fraud de-anonymization problem, that goes beyond fraud
detection, to unmask the human masterminds responsible for posting search rank
fraud in online systems. We collect and study search rank fraud data from
Upwork, and survey the capabilities and behaviors of 58 search rank fraudsters
recruited from 6 crowdsourcing sites. We propose Dolos, a fraud
de-anonymization system that leverages traits and behaviors extracted from
these studies, to attribute detected fraud to crowdsourcing site fraudsters,
thus to real identities and bank accounts. We introduce MCDense, a min-cut
dense component detection algorithm to uncover groups of user accounts
controlled by different fraudsters, and leverage stylometry and deep learning
to attribute them to crowdsourcing site profiles. Dolos correctly identified
the owners of 95% of fraudster-controlled communities, and uncovered fraudsters
who promoted as many as 97.5% of fraud apps we collected from Google Play. When
evaluated on 13,087 apps (820,760 reviews), which we monitored over more than 6
months, Dolos identified 1,056 apps with suspicious reviewer groups. We report
orthogonal evidence of their fraud, including fraud duplicates and fraud
re-posts.