FdGars: Fraudster Detection via Graph Convolutional Networks in Online App Review System

Online review system enables users to submit reviews about the products. However, the openness of Internet and monetary rewards for crowdsourcing tasks stimulates a large number of fraudulent users to write fake reviews and post advertisements to interfere the rank of apps. Existing methods for detecting spam reviews have been successful but they usually aims at e-commerce (e.g. Amazon, eBay) and recommendation (e.g. Yelp, Dianping) systems. Since the behaviors of fraudulent users are complex and varying across different review platforms, existing methods are not suitable for fraudster detection in the online app review system. To shed light on this question, we are among the first to analyze the intentions of fraudulent users from different review platforms and categorize them by utilizing characteristics of content (similarity, special symbols) and behaviors (timestamps, device, login status). With a comprehensive analysis of spamming activities and relationships between normal and malicious users, we design and present FdGars, the first graph convolutional network approach for fraudster detection in the online app review system. Then we evaluate FdGars on a real-world large-scale dataset (with 82,542 nodes and 42,433,134 edges) from Tencent App Store. The result demonstrates that F-1-score of FdGars can achieve 0.938+, which outperforms several baselines and state-of-the-art fraudsters detecting methods. Moreover, we deploy FdGars on Tencent Beacon Anti-Fraud Platform to show its effectiveness and scalability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use graph convolutional networks for fraudster detection in the large-scale online app review system. It is worth to mention that FdGars can uncover malicious accounts even the data are lack of labels in anti-spam tasks.