'A guiding light' to fraud

The Observer have picked up the story about software to track feedback shilling that we blogged about last week, and post an intriguing clue as to how it might work correctly:

Transactions between accomplices and fraudsters create a pattern that sticks out like 'a guiding light', says one of the researchers. The clue is that members of one group have lots of transactions with members of a second group, but don't have transactions with members of their own group.

Of course, now they've published this information, all the fraudsters need to do is to change the pattern of how their IDs interact and presumably they can still fool the software.

Still, we'll be interested to test this one if it does get a public release.