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SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

analytics.fixelsmith.com

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Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#111

Post by time4tea »

gosub100 wrote: post #97
time4tea wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive always suspected that this is all of a tax dodge, a money spinner, and a pr exercise "we gave xxx to charity" - no, your customers did. Just set up a direct debit to your favourite charity.

> Just the point of these drives is to get more people to give to charity. Then you use a lullaby-word as if setting up a charitable donation is as easy as saying "yes" when the checker asks if you want to give a small donation.

Well, my point was that maybe it actually isnt "to get more people to give to charity", maybe its actually something else.

Its actually very easy to give £5/month direct to a charity. Takes about 2 minutes, just gotta do it.

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#112

Post by foldr »

time4tea wrote: post #111
gosub100 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just the point of these drives is to get more people to give to charity. Then you use a lullaby-word as if setting up a charitable donation is as easy as saying "yes" when the checker asks if you want to give a small donation.

Well, my point was that maybe it actually isnt "to get more people to give to charity", maybe its actually something else. Its actually very easy to give £5/month direct to a charity. Takes about 2 minutes, just gotta do it.

You're overthinking this. There's a publicity element to it, but the money just gets given to charity, like they say it does. It's not a conspiracy or a tax accounting trick.

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#113

Post by jstanley »

foldr wrote: post #112
time4tea wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my point was that maybe it actually isnt "to get more people to give to charity", maybe its actually something else. Its actually very easy to give £5/month direct to a charity. Takes about 2 minutes, just gotta do it.

You're overthinking this. There's a publicity element to it, but the money just gets given to charity, like they say it does. It's not a conspiracy or a tax accounting trick.

How can you tell? And is this definitely universally true or just true of the 1 instance you happen to have personal experience with?

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#114

Post by jstanley »

reconnecting wrote: post #61

Hacker News, we need to talk! "Fixel Smith" is an AI-generated person, with an article that has very little to do with fraud analysis. 'This' is also a music artist (1), novelist (2), fraud analyst (3), influencer (4), and whatever else you can imagine. 220+ points and 70 comments, and very few notice it's quite a fake post — and no one that it's an AI generated person? 1. https://www.amazon.it/Forged-Soundtrack-Expl…

> very few notice it's quite a fake post

It's definitely a real post. Yes it's obviously LLM-written, but if the worst thing you can say about an article is that it looks LLM-written, then maybe you don't have any real criticisms.

Whether the contents are made up or not is unclear, but you can criticise the content of the article without needing to speculate on whether it was written by an LLM or whether it is a work of fiction. It has plenty of much more concrete flaws.

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#115

Post by reconnecting »

jstanley wrote: post #114
reconnecting wrote: post #61

Hacker News, we need to talk! "Fixel Smith" is an AI-generated person, with an article that has very little to do with fraud analysis. 'This' is also a music artist (1), novelist (2), fraud analyst (3), influencer (4), and whatever else you can imagine. 220+ points and 70 comments, and very few notice it's quite a fake post — and no one that it's an AI generated person? 1. https://www.amazon.it/Forged-Soundtrack-Expl…

> very few notice it's quite a fake post It's definitely a real post. Yes it's obviously LLM-written, but if the worst thing you can say about an article is that it looks LLM-written, then maybe you don't have any real criticisms. Whether the contents are made up or not is unclear, but you can criticise the content of the article without needing to speculate on whether it was written by an LLM or whether it is a work…

> It's definitely a real post.

The fact that the 'person' behind this post managed to publish a novel, a music album, and a few posts on fraud prevention all within a few days this month is enough for me to redflag it.

> you don't have any real criticisms.

Please check once again, I've already given my opinion on the article itself below. Here it is again for your convenience.

> I question the described approaches. For example, while impossible travel is a legitimate and widely used technique, it's related to online user behaviour based on IP address. Moreover, tirreno, for example, has separate rules for cases where the IP clearly comes from Apple Relay or VPN/Tor — those are separate flags. I assume some or all examples are LLM-generated, as the context is mixed up and no one actually collects GPS location in bulk for card swipes.

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#116

Post by foldr »

jstanley wrote: post #113
foldr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're overthinking this. There's a publicity element to it, but the money just gets given to charity, like they say it does. It's not a conspiracy or a tax accounting trick.

How can you tell? And is this definitely universally true or just true of the 1 instance you happen to have personal experience with?

Same way I can tell that my next door neighbor isn't poisoning my water supply or that Tesco doesn't have a secret chemical weapons program. That major supermarket chains are running scam charity appeals just isn't a hypothesis worth entertaining in the absence of any evidence for it.

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#117

Post by jstanley »

reconnecting wrote: post #115
jstanley wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very few notice it's quite a fake post It's definitely a real post. Yes it's obviously LLM-written, but if the worst thing you can say about an article is that it looks LLM-written, then maybe you don't have any real criticisms. Whether the contents are made up or not is unclear, but you can criticise the content of the article without needing to speculate on whether it was written by an LLM or whether it is a work…

> It's definitely a real post. The fact that the 'person' behind this post managed to publish a novel, a music album, and a few posts on fraud prevention all within a few days this month is enough for me to redflag it. > you don't have any real criticisms. Please check once again, I've already given my opinion on the article itself below. Here it is again for your convenience. > I question the described approaches. F…

Yeah the content of the post is totally bogus, but it's still a real post. The post exists, you can read it.

A fake blog post would be something that purports to be a blog post but actually isn't. This is definitely a real post.

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#118

Post by reconnecting »

relevant_stats wrote: post #76
reconnecting wrote: post #61

Hacker News, we need to talk! "Fixel Smith" is an AI-generated person, with an article that has very little to do with fraud analysis. 'This' is also a music artist (1), novelist (2), fraud analyst (3), influencer (4), and whatever else you can imagine. 220+ points and 70 comments, and very few notice it's quite a fake post — and no one that it's an AI generated person? 1. https://www.amazon.it/Forged-Soundtrack-Expl…

Hacker News has developed recently a frustrating habit of upvoting such low quality AI sloppy submissions. Makes me wonder if this AI flood uncovers the unflattering truth about this community acuteness, or it's only a failure of existing guardrails and we just need to change them.

This is something that genuinely interests me, but from a slightly different perspective. I regularly participate in tech/AI/fraud/security conferences, and I was curious whether people are really listening to and understanding the panelists, or just pretending to.

Last week I was on a privacy panel discussion where one of the speakers had a bad microphone, and honestly no one in the audience could actually hear what he was talking about for five minutes. Afterward, the audience, perhaps out of politeness, perhaps because no one really cared, reacted and applauded as usual.

This post, and especially its reception, feels like a caricature of what's happening in the tech industry right now. Hundreds upvote, very few really try to understand what the context is about, much less have the real experience to judge it, and yet here we are on the front page of HN.

Now the East Coast will wake up, and I'm really curious whether anything will change in this thread.

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#119

Post by stripefan »

janpeuker wrote: post #110

I agree the post looks a little AI written but generally this kind of analysis is quite common. Leaving aside human heuristics that are generally too well known to catch real scammers (like time travel or "7 days", which is bad because often weekly patterns are important so at the very least look at 10 days) and actually have low precision, what I find odd it that all results just return a user ID. So this is really…

[flagged]

Re: SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

#120

Post by gosub100 »

jstanley wrote: post #113
foldr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're overthinking this. There's a publicity element to it, but the money just gets given to charity, like they say it does. It's not a conspiracy or a tax accounting trick.

How can you tell? And is this definitely universally true or just true of the 1 instance you happen to have personal experience with?

Because the risk of fraud is too great for major corporations. They have accountants and businesses people who would report it.
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