Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
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Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#2I highly doubt the government would trust a service like that for such problems or even waste their valuable time. I'm sure they have much more efficient ways of detecting this then trying to sift through that junk. It's also very easy to manipulate check-in's (Foursquare specifically), in respect to checking into locations when you don't actually have to be there, physically. And as far as Facebook goes, you can check others into a location, which could easily spike false information.
Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#3The difficulty is in the details. Normalizing would have to account for a variety of different variables such as location, average age/customer base, average revenue per customer, etc. Furthermore, you would need all of that data many different businesses to even be able to build your normalization.
Sure, you could do a subpar job with the normalization but then that will increase your false positives and decrease confidence in the method.
Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#4A good exercise, but nothing beyond that. Too many factors based on assumption. Also repeat visitors tend to skip continued the check-ins after the novelty of it wears down (unless there are extremely good reward offers associated with number of check-ins).
Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#5I highly doubt the government would trust a service like that for such problems or even waste their valuable time. I'm sure they have much more efficient ways of detecting this then trying to sift through that junk. It's also very easy to manipulate check-in's (Foursquare specifically), in respect to checking into locations when you don't actually have to be there, physically. And as far as Facebook goes, you can che…
I guess the more general point I was thinking about is that there are tons of new signals that governments or private groups could use to assess all sorts of activities. For example the government has easy access to cellphone density data from carriers, which would be harder to game. Foursquare check-ins could be a cheap way to decide which places to look into first.
Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#6The effect is probably real, but the problem is the correlation coefficient probably varies over space and time.
E.g. you probably have a lot more Foursquare users in Silicon Valley than in Smalltown, USA.
Also, Foursquare probably has its popularity change over time. Right now it's still a little new and shiny, but its popularity might change over time.
If it was the only information available, it would be better than nothing. But your proposed method would be extremely noisy and unreliable.
Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#7A good exercise, but nothing beyond that. Too many factors based on assumption. Also repeat visitors tend to skip continued the check-ins after the novelty of it wears down (unless there are extremely good reward offers associated with number of check-ins).
As long as the "repeat visitors" pattern is the same across business categories, it wouldn't add noise. There are always first-time visitors.
Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#8Perhaps a slightly more realistic usage would be for financial analysts to use the data as a (weak) signal as to whether or not companies are on track to meet their earnings expectations. I believe that they have gone as far as to buy satellite pictures of parking lots (empty/full) to try to gauge how well big retailers are doing...
Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#9The effect is probably real, but the problem is the correlation coefficient probably varies over space and time. E.g. you probably have a lot more Foursquare users in Silicon Valley than in Smalltown, USA. Also, Foursquare probably has its popularity change over time. Right now it's still a little new and shiny, but its popularity might change over time. If it was the only information available, it would be better th…
The good thing is that it's not the only information available, just one more signal. And what's wrong with trying it out only in the Bay Area and New York, for example?
Re: Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
#10Related question. Am I wrong in assuming virtually every business that has a "cash only" policy does so to facilitate tax fraud?
I know there are legit exceptions, but isn't this the main reason they do it?