Context

BankSim is an agent-based simulator of bank payments based on a sample of aggregated transactional data provided by a bank in Spain. The main purpose of BankSim is the generation of synthetic data that can be used for fraud detection research. Statistical and a Social Network Analysis (SNA) of relations between merchants and customers were used to develop and calibrate the model. Our ultimate goal is for BankSim to be usable to model relevant scenarios that combine normal payments and injected known fraud signatures. The data sets generated by BankSim contain no personal information or disclosure of legal and private customer transactions. Therefore, it can be shared by academia, and others, to develop and reason about fraud detection methods. Synthetic data has the added benefit of being easier to acquire, faster and at less cost, for experimentation even for those that have access to their own data. We argue that BankSim generates data that usefully approximates the relevant aspects of the real data.

Content

We ran BankSim for 180 steps (approx. six months), several times and calibrated the parameters in order to obtain a distribution that get close enough to be reliable for testing. We collected several log files and selected the most accurate. We injected thieves that aim to steal an average of three cards per step and perform about two fraudulent transactions per day. We produced 594643 records in total. Where 587443 are normal payments and 7200 fraudulent transactions. Since this is a randomised simulation the values are of course not identical to original data.

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted during my PhD studies in Sweden at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH ww.bth.se). More about it: http://edgarlopez.net

Original paper

Please refer to this dataset using the following citations:

Lopez-Rojas, Edgar Alonso ; Axelsson, Stefan Banksim: A bank payments simulator for fraud detection research Inproceedings 26th European Modeling and Simulation Symposium, EMSS 2014, Bordeaux, France, pp. 144–152, Dime University of Genoa, 2014, ISBN: 9788897999324. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265736405_BankSim_A_Bank_Payment_Simulation_for_Fraud_Detection_Research