System and method for detecting fraudulent expenditure of transferable electronic assets
First Claim
1. An electronic asset system comprising:
- a plurality of electronic wallets;
a plurality of transferable electronic assets stored on the electronic wallets, the electronic assets being transferred from payer electronic wallets to payee electronic wallets during transactions; and
a fraud detection system to sample a subset of the transferred electronic assets to detect bad assets that have been used in a fraudulent manner, the fraud detection system further identifying the payer electronic wallets that transferred the bad assets.
2 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
An electronic asset system includes tamper-resistant electronic wallets that store transferable electronic assets. To break such tamper-resistant wallets, the criminal is expected to spend an initial investment to defeat the tamper-resistant protection. The electronic assets are issued by an institution to a wallet (anonymously or non-anonymously). During expenditure, the electronic assets are transferred from a payer wallet to a payee wallet. The payee wallets routinely submit the transferred assets for possible audit. A fraud detection system samples the assets submitted for audit to detect "bad" assets which have been used in a fraudulent manner. Upon detection, the fraud detection system identifies the electronic wallet that used the bad asset and marks it as a "bad wallet". The fraud detection system compiles a list of bad electronic wallets and distributes the list to warn other wallets of the bad electronic wallets. The list is relatively small since it only contains identities of certificates of bad wallets (and not bad coins) and the certificates have short expiration terms, and hence can be stored locally on each wallet. When a bad wallet next attempts to spend assets (whether fraudulently or not), the intended recipient will check the local hot list of bad wallets and refuse to transact business with the bad wallet.
153 Citations
67 Claims
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1. An electronic asset system comprising:
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a plurality of electronic wallets; a plurality of transferable electronic assets stored on the electronic wallets, the electronic assets being transferred from payer electronic wallets to payee electronic wallets during transactions; and a fraud detection system to sample a subset of the transferred electronic assets to detect bad assets that have been used in a fraudulent manner, the fraud detection system further identifying the payer electronic wallets that transferred the bad assets. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)
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18. An early detection and warning system for detecting fraudulent transactions involving transferable electronic assets, individual electronic assets being transferable from a payer electronic wallet to a payee electronic wallet during a transaction, the early detection and warning system comprising:
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a sample database; and a computer programmed to perform the following steps; store a sample of transferred electronic assets in the sample database; mark an electronic asset as a bad electronic asset in an event that the electronic asset has been transferred from a single payer wallet to multiple payee wallets; and identify the payer electronic wallet from which the electronic asset was transferred multiple times as a bad wallet. - View Dependent Claims (19, 20, 21, 22)
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23. An electronic fraud detection system for detecting fraudulent transactions involving electronic assets, the electronic fraud detection system comprising:
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an asset issuing unit to issue transferable electronic assets to asset holders, the electronic assets being subsequently transferred from payer asset holders to payee asset holders; and a fraud sampling unit to evaluate a sampled subset of the electronic assets received by the payee asset holders to detect if the electronic assets have been used in a fraudulent manner. - View Dependent Claims (24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31)
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32. An electronic asset system, comprising:
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an asset issuing unit to issue transferable electronic assets, the electronic assets being digitally signed by the asset issuing unit; a plurality of asset holders to store the signed electronic assets, each asset holder having an identification certificate containing a cryptographic public key, the certificate being digitally signed by a certifying authority, the asset holders including payer asset holders and payee asset holders wherein the payer asset holders use their corresponding signing keys to digitally sign the electronic assets when the electronic assets are transferred to the payee asset holders; a fraud sampling unit to evaluate a sampled subset of the electronic assets received by the payee asset holders to detect if the electronic assets have been used in a fraudulent manner, and in an event of detection, the fraud sampling unit using the payer asset holders'"'"' signatures on the fraudulently used electronic assets to identify bad payer asset holders that are responsible for the fraudulent use from among said plurality of asset holders; and the fraud sampling unit being configured to compile a list of the bad payer asset holders. - View Dependent Claims (33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45)
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46. A method for detecting fraudulent transactions involving electronic assets, the method comprising the following steps:
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issuing transferable electronic assets; storing the electronic assets in electronic wallets; spending at least some of the electronic assets contained on the electronic wallets by transferring the electronic assets from payer electronic wallets to payee electronic wallets; extracting a sample of the spent electronic assets; detecting from the sample of spent electronic assets whether there is one or more bad electronic assets that have been spent in a fraudulent manner; and upon detecting a bad electronic asset, identifying an electronic wallet from which the bad electronic asset was spent. - View Dependent Claims (47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58)
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59. A computer-implemented method for detecting fraudulent transactions involving transferable electronic assets used by electronic wallets, the electronic assets being transferred from payer electronic wallets to payee electronic wallets, the computer-implemented method comprising the following steps:
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extracting a sample of the transferred electronic assets; marking a transferred electronic asset as a bad electronic asset when the transferred electronic asset is transferred from a single payer electronic wallet to multiple payee electronic wallets; identifying a payee electronic wallet from which the bad electronic asset was transferred as a bad electronic wallet; and compiling a list of bad electronic wallets. - View Dependent Claims (60, 61, 62, 63)
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- 64. A method for transferring an electronic asset Ti from a payer to a payee, comprising the step of generating, at the payer, a next version of the electronic asset Ti+1 for transfer to the payee which is a concatenation of the electronic asset Ti received by the payer and a signed representation of the previous version Ti.
Specification