The current growth and the use technology in global stock markets has created unprecedented opportunities for the individuals and businesses to access capital and grow and diversify their portfolios. Individuals, nowadays can decide to invest and act in few minutes if not in few seconds. This growth has led to a corresponding growth in the amount of fraud and misconduct seen in the stock markets through the use of technology. The internet is often used as a real time platform for illegal financial activity such as illegal activities on Financial Discussion Boards (FDBs). Managing and monitoring FDBs in real time is a complex and time consuming task; given the volume of data produced and the fact that some of the data is unstructured. This paper presents a novel Financial Discussion Boards Irregularities Detection System (FDBs-IDS) for FDBs which can highlight irregularities or potentially unlawful practices on FDBs. For example comments that might suggest a pump and dump activity is happening. The proposed system extracts information from FDBs, where templates hosting scenarios of known illegal activities are used to detect any potential misdemeanors. Analysis conducted on a single day trading, found that of the 3000 comments extracted from FDBs, 0.2% of these comments were deemed suspicious and required further investigation of a discussion board moderator. The manpower required to perform this task manually over the course of a year could be excessive and unaffordable. This research highlights the importance and the need of an automated crime detection system on FDBs such as FDBs-IDS which could be used and thus tackle potential criminal activities on the internet.

Financial discussion boards (FDBs) have been widely used for a variety of financial knowledge exchange activities through the posting of comments on the FDBs. Popular public FDBs are prone to be used as a medium to spread false financial information due to having a larger group of audiences. Although online forums, in general, are usually integrated with anti-spam tools such as Akismet, moderation of posted contents heavily relies on human moderators. Unfortunately, popular FDBs attract many comments per day which realistically prevents human moderators from continuously monitoring and moderating possibly fraudulent contents. Such manual moderation can be extremely time-consuming. Moreover, due to the absence of useful tools, no relevant authorities are actively monitoring and handling potential financial crimes on FDBs. This paper presents a novel forward analysis methodology implemented in an Information Extraction (IE) prototype system named FDBs Miner (FDBM). This methodology aims to detect potentially illegal comments on FDBs while integrating share prices in the detection process as this helps to categorise the potentially illegal comments into different risk levels for investigation priority. The IE prototype system will first extract the public comments and per minute share prices from FDBs for the selected listed companies on London Stock Exchange (LSE). In the forward analysis process, the comments are flagged using a predefined Pump and Dump financial crime related keyword template. By only flagging the comments against the keyword template yields an average of 9.82% potentially illegal comments. It is unrealistic and unaffordable for human moderators to read these comments on a daily basis in long run. Hence, by integrating the share prices' hikes and falls to categorise the flagged comments based on risk levels, it saves time and allows relevant authorities to prioritise and investigate into the higher risk flagged comments as it can potentially indicate real Pump and Dump crimes on FDBs.

Abstract-Financial discussion boards (FDBs) have been widely used for a variety of financial knowledge exchange activities through the posting of comments. Popular public FDBs are prone to being used as a medium to spread false financial information due to larger audience groups. Although online forums are usually integrated with anti-spam tools, such as Akismet, moderation of posted content heavily relies on manual tasks. Unfortunately, the daily comments volume received on popular FDBs realistically prevents human moderators to watch closely and moderate possibly fraudulent content, not to mention moderators are not usually assigned with such task. Due to the absence of useful tools, it is extremely time consuming and expensive to manually read and determine whether each comment is potentially fraudulent. This paper presents novel forward and backward analysis methodologies implemented in an Information Extraction (IE) prototype system named FDBs Miner (FDBM). The methodologies aim to detect potentially illegal Pump and Dump comments on FDBs with the integration of per-minute share prices in the detection process. This can possibly reduce false positives during the detection as it categorises the potentially illegal comments into different risk levels for investigation purposes. The proposed system extracts company's ticker symbols (i.e. unique symbol that represents and identifies each listed company on stock market), comments and share prices from FDBs based in the UK. The forward analysis methodology flags the potentially Pump and Dump comments using a predefined keywords template and labels the flagged comments with price hike thresholds. Subsequently, the backward analysis methodology employs a moving average technique to determine price abnormalities and backward analyse the flagged comments. The first detection stage in forward analysis found 9.82% of potentially illegal comments. It is unrealistic and unaffordable for human moderators or financial surveillance authorities to read these comments on a daily basis. Hence, by integrating share prices to perform backward analysis can categorise the flagged comments into different risk levels. It helps relevant authorities to prioritise and investigate into the higher risk flagged comments, which could potentially indicate a real Pump and Dump crime happening on FDBs when the system is being used in real time.