Use This Tool to Look for Fraud in Big Data
The April 2017 Journal of Accountancy had an interesting article regarding the use of Benford’s Law to spot fraud. I experimented with real-life data and determined that Benford's Law can be used to quickly scan huge datasets for potential fraud indicators. The underlying idea is that natural patterns are everywhere, even in data that might appear, at first blush, to be random. Benford’s Law In the 1930’s, engineer and physicist Frank Benford was looking at a book containing