فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

From Covid-19 mortality rate to image tampering‎, ‎Benford's law is used to detect fraudulent activities‎. ‎The underlying assumption for using the law is that a ``regular‎" ‎dataset follows the significant digit phenomenon‎. ‎In this paper‎, ‎we address the scenario where a shrewd fraudster manipulates a list of numbers in such a way that while providing the desired statistics‎, ‎it still complies with Benford's law‎. ‎We develop a framework that offers several degrees of freedom to such a fraudster‎, ‎such as the minimum‎, ‎maximum‎, ‎mean‎, ‎and size of the manipulated dataset‎. ‎The conclusion further corroborates the idea that Benford's law‎ -‎if at all‎- ‎should be used with utmost discretion as a means for fraud detection.