A smart secured framework for detecting and averting online recruitment fraud using ensemble machine learning techniques

With the rise of the Internet and social media, information has become available at our fingertips. However, on the dark side, these advancements have opened doors for fraudsters. Online recruitment fraud (ORF) is one of the problems created by these modern technologies, as hundreds of thousands of applicants are victimized every year globally. Fraudsters advertise bogus jobs on online platforms and target job hunters with fake offerings such as huge salaries and desirable geographical locations. The objective of these fraudsters is to collect personal information to be misused in the future, leading to the loss of applicants’ privacy. To prevent such situations, there is a need for an automatic detecting system that can distinguish between real and fake job advertisements and preserve the applicants’ privacy. This study attempts to build a smart secured framework for detecting and preventing ORF using ensemble machine learning (ML) techniques. In this regard, four ensemble methods—AdaBoost (AB), Xtreme Gradient Boost (XGB), Voting, and Random Forest (RF)—are used to build a detection framework. The dataset used was pre-processed using several methods for cleaning and denoising in order to achieve better outcomes. The performance evaluation measures of the applied methods were accuracy, precision, sensitivity, F-measure, and ROC curves. According to these measures, AB performed best, followed by XGB, voting, and RF. In the proposed framework, AB achieved a high accuracy of 98.374%, showing its reliability for detecting and preventing ORF. The results of AB were compared to existing methods in the literature validating the reliability of the model to be significantly used for detecting ORF.