Combating shill bidding in online auctions

Trust is difficult to establish in online auctions since transactions occur among complete strangers. The Internet Fraud Complaint Center shows that auction fraud is the highest rate of crime in online activities. Nowadays, shill bidding is the most severe and persistent fraud for online auction users. Considering the strengths and weaknesses of existing works on combating shill bidding in online auction, in this paper, we propose a reliable software architecture, which includes seperate modules for bidding behavior tracking, IP tracking, user status management and user authorizing to secure and protect auction systems from shill bidders for both forward and reverse auctions. More precisely our auction system monitors and detects shill bidding in run-time as well as takes necessary actions against shill bidding, which helps to keep the auction system secured from auction frauds and establish trust among online auction users.