Pattern-aware Illicit Account Detection based on User Behavior Sequences

Illicit activities such as financial fraud and fake promotions are increasingly prevalent on social applications. The diverse behavioral structures of different types of illicit accounts pose difficulties in designing unified detection strategies. Unlike existing studies that focus on binary detection and often rely on user static profiles, we introduce a novel task: illicit account detection based solely on user behavior sequences. This task presents two key challenges: 1) illicit accounts often mimic benign users by performing normal-looking behavior subsequences, and 2) behaviors with the same action (e.g., add-friend, initiate-transaction) can serve different purposes, such as illicit or benign. To address these challenges, we propose a Pattern-aware Illicit Accounts Detection (PIAD) framework that consists of three components: 1) a dual-perspective pattern mining module that extracts category-specific self- and interaction-behavior patterns from behavior sequences to capture distinct behavioral regularities across different user types; 2) a contextualized action semantic encoding algorithm that aligns action codings with contextual dependencies among behaviors within user sequences to capture variations in purposes when behaviors with the same actions occur under different contexts; and 3) a pattern-aware fusion model that integrates the mined patterns with the context and interaction in behavior sequences to learn discriminative representations for detection. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PIAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with an average 7.51% improvement on F1 score.