He who pays the piper calls the tune.
traditional proverb
Nobody is going to suggest it is conventional for the comms sector to crowdfund the development of a web dashboard for the impartial presentation of fraud data collected from online resources around the world. But perhaps it is necessary.
The comms sector has plenty of data indicative of trends in criminal activity on networks. It does not have this data in one place, so comparisons can be performed and aberrations identified. Reports that summarize data are fairly common, but the motives of the authors often dictates the conclusions drawn from the data. This is especially dangerous within the realm of consumer protection. Fear can exercise a powerful influence over decisions; there can be the temptation to exaggerate risk in order to manipulate purchasing choices. On the other hand, when a significant investment has been made in a ‘solution’ to fraud, there can then be the temptation to torture the data to demonstrate the solution was effective, even if it was not.
Is there a way to eliminate all bias in the presentation of data about the risk of consumer fraud and other threats to the public that rely on the abuse of networks? That may be impossible. The crowdfunding campaign for the Commsrisk Global Fraud Dashboard will attempt the next best outcome: to minimize bias by obtaining many small financial backers with diverse interests. The beta prototype showed that the technology works and is stable. It has been live for 7 months. A mixture of cloud computing and AI permits us to interrogate APIs, scrape websites and run search queries on a daily basis at relatively low cost. Many more scripts can be written to collate a more data — and it is appropriate to pay the developers a fair wage for doing that work. How much work they do will depend on the amount raised.
