Expanding Awareness and Detecting Fraudulent Websites

Fraudulent websites or pages were a danger to which all web users are exposed,
these pages look like useful but turn out to have illegitimate purpose such as the theft of
sensitive user information but there are a lot of tools to use to detect malicious websites
(Iker Orive Mugica, 2020). Fake website is considered a website that is intended to
cause harm and manipulate users, especially novice users without some knowledge of
indicators of fakeness. With the growing problem of illegitimate websites, such as those
peddling fake news and selling counterfeit products, the detection of fraudulent websites
becomes more and more crucial. In this generation fraudulent websites have issued day
by day; this issue was worsened. Marzieh et al., (2023) stated that despite recent
advancements in malicious website detection and phishing mitigation, the security
ecosystem paid little attention to Fraudulent e-Commerce Websites (FCWs).

According to Nicholas et al., (2023) fake websites extract a very large financial
and psychological toll on consumers across the globe, with some estimates reaching
billions of dollars each year, yet there is a scarcity of empirical data on why some
consumers respond to fake websites while others remain immune. Shengli et al., (2023)
stated that the feature analysis of fraudulent websites is of great significance to combat,
prevention and control of telecom fraud crimes. Internet scams are fraudulent attempts
aim to lure computer users to reveal their credentials or redirect their connection to
spoofed webpages rather than the actual ones, users’ confidential information is the
main target of these fraudulent websites. One of the most common social engineering
attacks called phishing attacks, targeting users emails to fraudulently steal confidential
and sensitive information (Donatus et al., 2023). Phishing attack also misleads people
into accessing dangerous content and discovering their personal information and many
phishing sites are indistinguishable from legitimate ones, both visually and in terms of
their Universal Resource Location (URL). It is needed to be prevented in order to
increase the overall trust of the public on the internet (Uday et al., 2023 and Mustafa et
al., 2020).
 With the rapid development of the internet, there has been a high incidence of
telecom fraud cases, existing methods for identifying fraudulent website, most of them
uses machine learning to identify URLs and static files (HTML text and image
resources), which cannot take into account features contained in the pictures in the
static files and cannot be verified the website quickly and accurately (Feng Zhou and
Xiaodong Liu, 2023). Asha et al., (2016) stated that the web has become a crucial
worldwide platform for online shopping and people go online to sell and buy products,
use online banking facilities and even give opinions about their online shopping, reason
that some people involved in online transaction with fraudulent e-business give fake
positive reviews that actually does not exist to promote or degrade the product. Due to
several undesirable impacts of internet frauds and scams, fraudulent website detection
model was proposed based on sentiment analysis of the textual contents of a given
websites, using natural language processing and supervised machine learning
techniques (Mahdi et al., 2018).

There are no large-scale mitigation systems or publicly available datasets for

Fraudulent e-Commerce Websites and Google Safe Browsing have a detection rate of
just 0.46% (Marzieh et al., 2023). Comparing fusion method and single-modal method,
fusion method is more effective than single-modal method in identifying fraudulent
websites, which increases by at least 1 % (Shengli et al., 2023). To detect Phishing,
authors present findings on detecting phishing websites, comparing three methods,
Naïve Bayes, SMO, and J48 algorithms, result shows that Naïve Bayes performed poor
except for the SMO and J48 algorithms (Mustafa et al., 2020).

1. How can the poor performance of other methods proposed in past studies can
be improved?

2. What are the other ways to detect fraudulent websites aside from the
proposed and already studied?

3. What is the level of awareness of the people about the issues of fraudulent
website?