08-17-2017, 12:13 AM
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Credit Card Fraud Detection Using Hidden Markov Model
abstract
Introduction
Credit-card-based purchases can be categorized into two types: 1) physical card and 2) virtual card. In a physical-card based purchase, the cardholder presents his card physically to a merchant for making a payment. To carry out fraudulent transactions in this kind of purchase, an attacker has to steal the credit card. If the cardholder does not realize the loss of card, it can lead to a substantial financial loss to the credit card company. In the second kind of purchase, only some important information about a card (card number, expiration date, secure code) is required to make the payment. Such purchases are normally done on the Internet or over the telephone. To commit fraud in these types of purchases, a fraudster simply needs to know the card details. Most of the time, the genuine cardholder is not aware that someone else has seen or stolen his card information. The only way to detect this kind of fraud is to analyze the spending patterns on every card and to figure out any inconsistency with respect to the usual spending patterns. Fraud detection based on the analysis of existing purchase data of cardholder is a promising way to reduce the rate of successful credit card frauds. Since humans tend to exhibit specific behaviorist profiles, every cardholder can be represented by a set of patterns containing information about the typical purchase category, the time since the last purchase, the amount of money spent, etc. Deviation from such patterns is a potential threat to the system.