Detection and Control of Credit Card Fraud Attacks in Sliding Window with Exponential Forgetting

Journal article, 2025

Credit card fraud causes significant financial losses and frequently occurs as fraud attack, defined as short-term sequence of fraudulent transactions associated with high transaction rates and amounts, business areas historically tied to fraud, unusual transaction times and locations and different types of errors.

Confidence interval method in the moving window with exponential forgetting is proposed in this paper which allows to capture recent changes in the shopping behaviour of the cardholder, detect fraudulent amounts and mitigate the attack. Fraud risk scoring method is used for estimation of the intensity of the fraudulent activity via monitoring of the transaction rates, merchant category codes, times and some other factors for detection of the start of the attack.

The development and verification are based on detailed analysis of the transaction patterns from the dataset, which represents an extensive collection of around 24.4 million credit card transactions from IBM financial database. Recommendations for further development of the detection techniques are also presented.