Fraud Detection in White-Collar Crime

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1.3, Heilbronn University, language: English, abstract: White-collar crime is and has always been an urgent issue for the society. In recent years, white-collar crime has increased dramatically by technological advances. The studies show that companies are affected annually by corruption, balance-sheet manipulation, embezzlement, criminal insolvency and other economic crimes. The companies are usually unable to identify the damage caused by fraudulent activities. To prevent fraud, companies have the opportunity to use intelligent IT approaches. The data analyst or the investigator can use the data which is stored digitally in today's world to detect fraud.

In the age of Big Data, digital information is increasing enormously. Storage is cheap today and no longer a limited medium. The estimates assume that today up to 80 percent of all operational information is stored in the form of unstructured text documents. This bachelor thesis examines Data Mining and Text Mining as intelligent IT approaches for fraud detection in white-collar crime. Text Mining is related to Data Mining. For a differentiation, the source of the information and the structure is important. Text Mining is mainly concerned with weak- or unstructured data, while Data Mining often relies on structured sources.

At the beginning of this bachelor thesis, an insight is first given on white-collar crime. For this purpose, the three essential tasks of a fraud management are discussed. Based on the fraud triangle of Cressey it is showed which conditions need to come together so that an offender commits a fraudulent act. Following, some well-known types of white-collar crime are considered in more detail.

Text Mining approach was used to demonstrate how to extract potentially useful knowledge from unstructured text. For this purpose, two self-generated e-mails were converted into struc-tured format. Moreover, a case study will be conducted on fraud detection in credit card da-taset. The dataset contains legitimate and fraudulent transactions. Based on a literature research, Data Mining techniques are selected and then applied on the dataset by using various sampling techniques and hyperparameter optimization with the goal to identify correctly pre-dicted fraudulent transactions. The CRISP-DM reference model was used as a methodical procedure.