Promises of profits that sound too good to be true, trading bots that multiply your investment in a matter of days, and €250 investments that result in four-figure payouts. Online investing is booming, and so is investment fraud. Another booming business is the online sale of medicines - whether it's ads for Viagra on Facebook or fake shops selling prescription drugs online. Much of it is illegal, but many consumers don't know it. Fraud Seeker will investigate where and how fake pills are being offered. 

Our aim is to reach small investors and consumers in their moment of doubt, when they are looking for information on fraud via search engines. If they find the Watchlist internet alerts, significant financial and/or health damage can be prevented in time.  The situation is serious and the need for solutions is acute: counterfeit medicines already account for 10% of the pharmaceutical market, some dangerous substances are found in food supplements and dubious investment scams are causing major financial damage in Austria.

Our approach is to develop a crawler that searches these websites and their advertisements. By searching for similarities in fraudulent websites (clusters), e.g. code snippets, contact details, text elements from terms and conditions, many more scams can be found. By developing a crawler, we aim to automate this search and significantly expand our warning lists.