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A logical consideration on fraudulent email communication

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Abstract

One of the most serious problems in modern society is that internet users are deceived by various fake information. In this paper, we analyse a scenario based on an actual incident of fraud called business email compromise (BEC). We suppose that each email, in the incident, step-wisely changes user’s thinking and makes him or her believe the emails. If fraud has such a step-by-step mechanism, it allows us to consider counter measures for dissuading a user from decision-making on the way. We discuss features and factors of the incident based on formulations of Channel theory. Our analysis revealed that each email message influenced user’s decision-making by what kind of logical trap. It can be fundamental knowledge that is capable of warning the user with predicting logical traps. This paper contributes to providing a novel viewpoint to develop systems for detecting deception of BEC.

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Notes

  1. If emails resemble perfectly authentic ones, we suppose that M can have only one type, or all elements in M can be written as “1”. In that sense, Fig. 4 implies that Bob and Charlie can have some reactions when emails resemble imperfectly authentic ones.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, 2-1 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan

    Seiko Myojin & Noboru Babaguchi

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  1. Seiko Myojin
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  2. Noboru Babaguchi
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Correspondence to Seiko Myojin.

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This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP16H06302.

This work was presented in part at the 24th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics (Beppu, Oita, January 23–25, 2019).

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Myojin, S., Babaguchi, N. A logical consideration on fraudulent email communication. Artif Life Robotics 25, 475–481 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-020-00597-4

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