Using the RetSim simulator for fraud detection research

Managing fraud is important for business, retail and financialalike. One method to manage fraud is by \emph{detection}, wheretransactions etc. are monitored and suspicious behaviour is flaggedfor further investigation. There is currently a lack of publicresearch in this area. The main reason is the sensitive nature of thedata. Publishing real financial transaction data would seriouslycompromise the privacy of both customers, and companies alike. Wepropose to address this problem by building RetSim, a multi-agentbased simulator (MABS) calibrated with real transaction data from oneof the largest shoe retailers in Scandinavia. RetSim allows us togenerate synthetic transactional data that can be publicly shared andstudied without leaking business sensitive information, and stillpreserve the important characteristics of the data. We then use RetSim to model two common retail fraud scenarios toascertain exactly how effective the simplest form of statisticalthreshold detection could be. The preliminary results of our testedfraud detection method show that the threshold detection is effectiveenough at keeping fraud losses at a set level, that there is littleeconomic room for improved techniques