Online Credit Card Fraud and Spending in the UK
December 29th, 2009by William Benjamin
About the Author: To change this standard text, you have to enter some information about your self in the Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile box. Read more from this authorI was recently perusing the very informative Guardian News Data Store. As a British news source, Guardian has a significant amount of data focused on the United Kingdom. It’s worth mentioning that they also have an ample amount of data that pertains to the global community, and a section geared just for the United States. A data set that I was particularly intrigued by was about online credit card fraud by postcode in the UK. Identity theft and credit card fraud is a crime that happens all to commonly in today’s tech savvy world. When you look at the numbers published by Guardian, it’s rather alarming to see how much money was stolen and used by online frauds–from August 2008 through August 2009, £500 million of an estimated £46 billion of shoppers money was recorded as fraudulent transactions.
To visualize these alarming statistics, I thought it would be interesting to geotag the postcodes with latitudes and longitudes to then formulate a map in Maker!. Below is a map I made that shows the number of recorded frauds in each postcode with a focus on London. I chose to zoom in on London because the proportion symbols were the largest representing the most amount of frauds. Click here to view the interactive map in Maker and pan/zoom out to see which other areas of the UK had an abundance of frauds, namely Manchester, Nottingham, Romford, and Birmingham.
 |
While I was checking out a map I made of the estimated £46 billion that UK shoppers spent using credit cards online, I realized that there is a helpful tool when zooming into different areas of the UK. If you hold down the ‘shift’ key, right click, and then draw a diagonal line across an area on a map, a transparent blue box will appear. The screen will then zoom to the selected area. Below is a tutorial that illustrates this process:
 |
Click here to view the online credit card fraud data set in Finder!. The data set also includes total value in £, number of goods ordered, number of frauds, fraud value in £, and percent(%) of good and bad transactions.
Popularity: 9% [?]
January 8th, 2010 at 8:15 am
Good post. It would be good to be able to illustrate this sort of data using a heat map. Ideally directly from each lat/lng instead of having to count and group by postal district.
January 22nd, 2010 at 10:29 am
This is really cool. I blogged about common point of purchase (CPP) fraud detection a few months ago.
Yours demonstrates an outstanding visual map of similar fraud detection. I’m not sure if the data get’s close enough to identify anything specifically, but one can definitely get an idea where fraud is more likely, based on the clusters shown in the map.
May 24th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Identity Theft is so rampant these days because it is quite easy to harvest information from someone else.;”.
May 25th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
i am not a fan of having credits and getting credits cards.:~*
May 27th, 2010 at 1:49 am
I hope, you will find the correct decision. Do not despair.
June 24th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
awesome blog…I’ve actually enjoyed it!