OLX is a major online classifieds platform with a massive user base and high daily activity. Here are some key metrics that illustrate the scale at which OLX operates:
- Daily Active Users (DAU): 3M+
- Daily Image Uploads: 700K+
- Daily Chats: 15M+
- Daily Ad Events: 200K+
Given this scale, maintaining the platform’s integrity and preventing fraud is paramount. Let’s explore how OLX approaches fraud prevention, ensuring a safe and trustworthy user experience.
What kind of frauds happen on OLX:
Advance payment fraud is a common scam on classified platforms where the fraudster, posing as a legitimate seller, asks for an upfront payment before the buyer receives the product. Here’s how it typically works and how to protect yourself
How Fraudsters Trick Genuine Users:
- Attractive Listing: The scammer posts a listing for an item at an appealing price, often significantly lower than market value to attract buyers quickly.
- Urgency Creation: The seller might create a sense of urgency, claiming that there are multiple interested buyers or that the item needs to be sold quickly due to a personal emergency.
- Advance Payment Request: The seller requests an advance payment to secure the item. They might use reasons such as covering shipping costs, holding the item, or as a sign of good faith.
- Payment Method: The fraudster often asks for the payment to be made online without meeting in person
- Disappearance: Once the payment is made, the seller disappears. The item is never delivered, and the buyer cannot reach the seller.
Approaching Fraud Prevention on the Platform:
Fraud prevention at OLX is guided by three major criteria: Accuracy, Coverage, and Speed.
Accuracy ensures that false positives do not impact genuine users. It is crucial to minimize the inconvenience to legitimate users while effectively identifying fraudulent activities.
Coverage, primarily recall, measures the proportion of fraudulent activities detected by our rules and algorithms. The goal is to capture the majority of fraud instances within our detection frameworks.
Speed of detection is critical. Detecting fraud quickly, before significant damage is done, is essential. A system that detects fraud accurately but too slowly is of limited value.
Fraud Prevention Strategy and Tactics
OLX employs a multi-faceted approach to fraud prevention, leveraging advanced technology and thorough analysis of fraudsters’ behaviour.
Fraud Mindset and Modus Operandi
Fraudsters typically follow a three-step process:
- Attract More Population: List items at very attractive prices or use other tactics to draw attention.
- Communicate and Build Trust: Establish communication with potential victims, often moving the conversation outside OLX to evade monitoring.
- Ask for Advance Payments: Once trust is built, ask for advance payments, for finalizing the fraud.
Execution of Fraud Steps
Step 1: Attract More Population
- Lucrative Price: Fraudsters often list items at below-market prices to attract more users.
- Images with Phone Numbers: They include phone numbers in images to facilitate direct contact.
- Buyer Fraud: Fraudsters pose as buyers, making appealing offers to sellers to gain their trust.
Step 2: Communicate and Build Trust
- Sharing Text/Images on OLX Chat: They use the platform’s chat feature to share more information.
- Phone Calls: Fraudsters use direct phone calls to create a personal connection.
- Communicate Outside OLX Ecosystem: They attempt to move the conversation to unmonitored channels.
Step 3: Ask for Advance Payments
- Once trust is established, they ask for advance payments, completing the fraud cycle.
Comprehensive Fraud Touchpoints
Fraudsters target multiple touchpoints within the platform:
- Price
- Ad Images
- Ad Title and Description
- Text Chats
- Images in Chats
How Process works:
Deployed Solutions for Fraud Detection
OLX has implemented solutions to address all the mentioned touchpoints:
- Lucrative Price Detection:
- Data science models predict a fair price for items.
- Listings with prices significantly lower than the predicted value are flagged for moderation.
- Phone Number Detection in Ad Images:
- Computer Vision OCR models detect phone numbers in images.
- Ads containing phone numbers are flagged for moderation.
- Ad Title and Description Monitoring:
- Regular expressions are used to detect and block phone numbers in text content.
- Chat Monitoring:
- Various rules and algorithms detect suspicious patterns in text and images shared in chats.
Detailed Look at Specific Solutions
Pricing Solution
- Predict Price for the Entity: A model predicts a fair market price for the item.
- Check Delta of Listing Price and Predicted Price: If the delta exceeds a set threshold, the ad is sent for moderation.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
- Phone Number Detection: The OCR model scans images for phone number patterns.
- Moderation: Ads containing phone numbers are sent to the moderation team.
All these algorithms are applied on the Events level by consuming data streams that ensure minimum time to detect fraud activity and allow us to take timely actions.
By integrating these advanced technological solutions, OLX effectively mitigates fraud, ensuring a secure environment for its users. These efforts illustrate OLX’s commitment to providing a trustworthy platform for buying and selling.
With all these techniques we have achieved great success and made the platform much safer for our users. Brand and User Trust are key values of OLX where we make continuous efforts to make our platform safe.
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