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Transactions of Trust: Fraud on Online Marketplaces

Online marketplaces rely upon trust: the trust between buyers and sellers, and between users and the platform upon which they engage. However, this essential component of the online ecosystem is being damaged by sustained acts of fraud.

This report maps the activity of one sophisticated fraud operation, serving as a case study of fraudulent marketplace activities. The described operation actively exploits a range of online marketplaces to post fake listings of cars to defraud users. We share the methodology of these threat actors and demonstrate how access to intelligence gathered across the internet can secure platforms and their users.

 

 

Portrait of Gideon Freud, author on the ActiveFence blog
Gideon Freud

Gideon is a Senior Intelligence Writer at ActiveFence. He graduated from Oxford University in 2012, where he studied social and cultural anthropology with a special focus on the growth of political extremism in Europe. He joined ActiveFence in January 2021, and is interested in researching the development of national laws focused on regulating online activities.