Background:
The Internet is used to establish and maintain close personal relationships and is otherwise used as the virtual commons on which the whole world conducts vital human communication. The Internet is used everywhere and the dependence of its users on information communicated through the Internet has provided an opportunity for deceptive persons to harm others, to steal and to otherwise abuse the communicative power of the Internet through deception. Deception, the intentional attempt to create a false belief in another, which the communicator knows to be untrue, has many modes of implementation. For example, deception can be conducted by providing false information (e.g., email scam, phishing etc.) Or falsifying the authorship, gender or age of the author of text content (e.g., impersonation). The negative impact of deceptive activities on the Internet has immense psychological, economic, emotional, and even physical implications. Research into these issues has been conducted by others and various strategies for detecting deception have been proposed.
To prevent e-commerce scams, some organizations have offered guides to users, such as ebay's spoof email tutorial, and the Federal Trade Commission's phishing prevention guide. Although these guides offer sufficient information for users to detect phishing attempts, they are often ignored by the web surfers. In many email phishing scams, in order to get the user's personal information such as name, address, phone number, password, and social security number, the email is usually directed to a deceptive website that has been established only to collect a user's personal information, that may be used for identity theft. Due to the billions of dollars lost because of phishing, anti-phishing technologies have drawn much attention.
Summary:
This patent provides a system for detecting deception in communications having a computer programmed with software that automatically analyzes a text message in digital form for deceptiveness by at least one of statistical analysis of text content to ascertain and evaluate psycho-linguistic cues that are present in the text message, IP geo-location of the source of the message, gender analysis of the author of the message, authorship similarity analysis, and analysis to detect coded/camouflaged messages. The computer has means to obtain the text message in digital form and store the text message within a memory of said computer, as well as means to access truth data against which the veracity of the text message can be compared. A graphical user interface is provided through which a user of the system can control the system and receive results concerning the deceptiveness of the text message analyzed thereby.
Benefits:
- Psycho-linguistic modeling and statistical analysis for detecting deception.
- Better communication between two or more peers
- Helps avoid miscommunicaton
Applications:
- Helps in reducing the rate on online-fraud
- Better helps in narrowing down a suspect in an online-fraud case.
Full patent: Systems and methods for automatically detecting deception in human communications expressed in digital form
FY10-04
Information Assurance/Cyber Security
David Zimmerman Director of Technology Commercialization Stevens Institute of Technology dzimmer3@stevens.edu