Custom officials across the world encounter huge volumes of transactions.
With increased connectivity and globalization, the customs transactions
continue to grow every year. Associated with customs transactions is the
customs fraud - the intentional manipulation of goods declarations to avoid the
taxes and duties. With limited manpower, the custom offices can only undertake
manual inspection of a limited number of declarations. This necessitates the
need for automating the customs fraud detection by machine learning (ML)
techniques. Due the limited manual inspection for labeling the new-incoming
declarations, the ML approach should have robust performance subject to the
scarcity of labeled data. However, current approaches for customs fraud
detection are not well suited and designed for this real-world setting. In this
work, we propose GraphFC (Graph neural networks for
Customs Fraud), a model-agnostic, domain-specific,
semi-supervised graph neural network based customs fraud detection algorithm
that has strong semi-supervised and inductive capabilities. With upto 252%
relative increase in recall over the present state-of-the-art, extensive
experimentation on real customs data from customs administrations of three
different countries demonstrate that GraphFC consistently outperforms various
baselines and the present state-of-art by a large margin