SDD Sentinel: A Support Tool for Detecting and Investigating Electronic Transaction Frauds

Abstract

In the last few years public authorities, businesses and citizens of European Union are benefiting from a common payments area, namely the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), which reduces the cost and speeds up domestic and cross-border payments. The services provided by SEPA - e.g. direct debits, credit transfers, card payments - have immediately become an attractive target for cyber criminals. In this context, the capability of processing Big Data in real time and investigating the detecting frauds for root cause analysis is a fundamental requirements for any fraud detection system. This paper presents a support tool, named the SDD Sentinel, aiming at securing SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) payments. The SDD Sentinel application leverages the storage and stream processing capabilities provided by the LeanBigData platform, that is an ultra-scalable and ultra-efficient real time solution especially designed for Big Data analytics by the LeanBigData EU-funded project. The effectiveness of the proposed application is validated through a testing activity using a large dataset of real SDD transactions.