Real culprits in the dataset? about tabformer

[ealtman741]

The source of the financial frauds is a population of criminals who steal cards (or buy info on stolen cards from the dark web). These criminals may use the stolen cards at whichever merchants they choose. To use a stolen card does not require merchant complicity, and normally merchants are not complicit. Thus, as you indicate, "the source of fraud are external parties that conceal their identities."

As a result and as you also note, the criminals end up using the stolen cards at only 3K of the 100K merchants at which transactions are conducted.

There are more details on how the data is generated here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.03033

Please let us know if you have further comments or questions.

--Erik Altman