ÖIAT Research

The Austrian Institute for Applied Telecommunications (ÖIAT) has been promoting the competent, safe and responsible use of digital media for more than 20 years. Together with our partners, we conduct research on current topics related to the digital world. On this page we provide an overview of past and current research projects.

Fake-Shop Detector

Coordination

Partner

Funding

Results

Contact

Julia Krickl
Co-Head of Research & Innovation
krickl@oiat.at
+43-1-595 2112-28

Artificial Intelligence Fraud Fraud Detection Online Shopping

Fake shops inflict substantial economic harm. A dark field study conducted by the Board for Traffic Safety in 2021 estimated that 320,000 consumers in Austria are directly impacted, resulting in financial losses of approximately €16 million. The free tool Fake-Shop Detector provides proactive warnings against fraudulent online retailers directly within the browser, offering Austrian consumers enhanced protection while shopping online.

The Fake Shop Detector checks every online shop in two steps: First, a database of reputable and fraudulent online shops is searched, which is curated by experts. If an online shop is unknown, the second step is a real-time analysis by artificial intelligence (AI). In the automatic analysis of websites, attention is paid to the quality and traceability of the AI. It never learns unsupervised, but is subject to constant review and quality control by the Watchlist Internet experts. Since the end of July 2020, 1 million shop evaluations have already been carried out via the Fake Shop Detector.

The Fake Shop Detector knows more than 10,000 fraudulent online shops and more than 25,783 trustworthy online shops in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Currently, more than 8,500 users are participating in the beta operation. There are 400,000 API requests to the system per day.

In a first step, the Fake Shop Detector uses a database to check whether the page you are visiting has already been clearly rated as a fake shop or as a serious online shop. This database includes the following data sources that have been checked by experts:

List of fraudulent or problematic online shops from the Watchlist Internet
Shops with quality seals and certificates (E-Commerce Gütezeichen, Schweizer Gütezeichen)
Lists of cooperation partners (Hauptverband des österreichischen Buchhandels, Elektrofachhändler Expert, Geizhals)
Directories of Austrian online shops (Falter Onlineshop Fibel, Onlineshop-Austria.at, Österreichisches Onlineshop-Verzeichnis)
Entries for reputable online shops from previous checks by the Detector

All unknown websites are evaluated by the Fake Shop Detector with regard to their similarity to fake shops. The decisive factors are not individual features, but many features in combination. 21,528 features are included in the real-time evaluation by the artificial intelligence.

To ensure quality, the artificial intelligence behind it was developed in cooperation with the internet fraud experts of Watchlist Internet. After all, an AI is only as good as the data it is based on. The data basis for the Fake Shop Detector was thousands of known fake shops, from which page features were taken. The quality of the risk assessments is also constantly checked by the experts. Past tests show that the risk assessments of the Fake Shop Detector are very good overall.

The Fake-Shop Detector is the result of ongoing research projects. Work on the detection of fake shops by artificial intelligence has been ongoing since 2018. The Fake Shop Detector is being developed by the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, the Austrian Institute for Applied Telecommunications (ÖIAT) and the Upper Austrian IT company X-Net.

Cooperation partners are Ciuvo GmbH, mindUp Web+Intelligence GmbH, the Competence Centre Safe Austria (KSÖ) and the Federal Ministry of Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection (BMSGPK).

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