Learning to detect and measure fake ecommerce websites in search-engine results

Abstract

When searching for a brand name in search engines, it is very likely to come across websites that sell fake brand's products. In this paper, we study how to tackle and measure this problem automatically. Our solution consists of a pipeline with two learning stages. We first detect the ecommerce websites (including shopbots) present in the list of search results and then discriminate between legitimate and fake ecommerce websites. We identify suitable learning features for each stage and show through a prototype system termed RI.SI.CO. that this approach is feasible, fast, and highly effective. Experimenting with one goods sector, we found that RI.SI.CO. achieved better classification accuracy than that of non-expert humans. We next show that the information extracted by our method can be used to generate sector-level 'counterfeiting charts' that allow us to analyze and compare the counterfeit risk associated with different brands in a same sector. We also show that the risk of coming across counterfeit websites is affected by the particular web search engine and type of search query used by shoppers. Our research offers new insights and some very practical and useful means for analyzing and measuring counterfeit ecommerce websites in search-engine results, thus enabling targeted anti-counterfeiting actions.