Investigating Fraud and Misconduct in Legitimate Internet Economy based on Customer Complaints

Different forms of cybercrimes, ranging from email spam and click fraud to the most sophisticated underground economy, have been studied extensively. Fraud and misconduct in legitimate Internet economy, however, have not received sufficient attention, even though potential damages may not be as severe as regular cybercrimes. In this paper, we have performed the first in-depth empirical investigation of fraud and misconduct in legitimate Internet businesses by collecting 6.6 million customer complaints, which were filed over 45 months by 2.7 million customers against 117 thousand merchants on one of the largest customer complaint platforms in the world, along with more than 13 million customer-uploaded images as photographic evidence. We characterized the complaints in terms of merchants, main issues, desired remedy, amount of money involved, customer ratings, and etc. Most importantly, we were able to uncover various fraud and misconduct in different Internet businesses, some of which should have caught law enforcement's attention. The sum of the amount of money involved in these complaints is 5.4 billion US dollars. We also investigated the privacy inference of the images, and found that the image content could disclose an unexpected amount of customers' personal information.