Up to 10,000 online posts every day are tagged as potentially fraudulent by artificial intelligence (AI), while 90 percent of those that are reported to social media platforms are taken down, the National Institute of Cyber Security said yesterday.
The institute under the Ministry of Digital Affairs was commissioned to develop technologies to combat fraud with a budget of NT$20 million (US$618,085).
The ministry yesterday held a news conference to share what the project has achieved thus far, attended by Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs Lin Yi-jing (林宜敬) and institute Vice President Lin Ying-dar (林盈達).
Photo: CNA
The No. 1 keyword in the project’s analysis of fraudulent posts on social media was actually “fraud,” as many claim to not be fraudulent and even ask for help recovering from fraud, institute official Chiang Yu-hsien (江禹賢) said.
About 97 percent of the posts only appear on social media platforms for up to two days, often disappearing by the third as they are usually taken down once detected, he said.
The most impersonated person is “Mr 486” (486先生) an e-commerce mogul and influencer, Chiang said.
The posts also keep up with current events, with content related to Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) picking up while he was in Taiwan earlier this month, he added.
Starting this year, the fraud busting team began using AI to automatically monitor online advertisements and social media posts, inspecting more than 500,000 every month, Chiang said.
The name and account identification program being developed by the institute has a more than 93 percent accuracy rate, he added.
The most prevalent types of scams at the moment are a mix of investment, identity impersonation and dating scams, the institute said.
New tactics have also emerged, including dating advice, impersonating official Web sites, fake online courses, fake event registration to obtain personal information and fraudulent charity donation pages, it said.
The program sweeps platforms to identify potentially fraudulent posts, which are then confirmed by people, Lin said.
However, since the posts do not stay online for long, the work is “like playing whack-a-mole,” he said, adding that they hope for posts to be taken down even faster to minimize exposure to potential victims.
Officials estimate that it takes about eight hours on average for a platform to take down flagged content after it is reported.
Lin said that his team is not satisfied with that rate, and to improve, is planning three tactics.
The first is automating the detection of content, followed by setting up a priority order for review, he said.
The last tactic is passing the draft anti-fraud bill currently under consideration in the legislature to give a legal basis for platforms to take down offending content without the fear of legal reprisals, Lin said.
The database is to be integrated into the fraud search Web site the ministry is developing so that the public can search suspicious content they find online, Lin said.
For posts impersonating public figures, those that are automatically flagged would be sent to the celebrity for verification along with a mechanism to take them down, he said.
There have been some errors so far, but the team hopes to improve its accuracy through automation and record-keeping, he added.
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