ScamSpot: Fighting Financial Fraud in Instagram Comments

Stefan Erben, Andreas Waldis


Abstract
The long-standing problem of spam and fraudulent messages in the comment sections of Instagram pages in the financial sector claims new victims every day. Instagram’s current spam filter proves inadequate, and existing research approaches are primarily confined to theoretical concepts. Practical implementations with evaluated results are missing. To solve this problem, we propose ScamSpot, a comprehensive system that includes a browser extension, a fine-tuned BERT model and a REST API. This approach ensures public accessibility of our results for Instagram users using the Chrome browser. Furthermore, we conduct a data annotation study, shedding light on the reasons and causes of the problem and evaluate the system through user feedback and comparison with existing models. ScamSpot is an open-source project and is publicly available at https://scamspot.github.io/.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-demo.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julians, Malta
Editors:
Nikolaos Aletras, Orphee De Clercq
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
71–81
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-demo.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stefan Erben and Andreas Waldis. 2024. ScamSpot: Fighting Financial Fraud in Instagram Comments. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 71–81, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ScamSpot: Fighting Financial Fraud in Instagram Comments (Erben & Waldis, EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-demo.9.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-demo.9.mp4