GraphFC: Customs Fraud Detection with Label Scarcity

Customs officials across the world encounter huge volumes of transactions. Associated with customs transactions is customs fraud-the intentional manipulation of goods declarations to avoid taxes and duties. Due to limited manpower, the customs offices can only manually inspect a small number of declarations, necessitating the automation of customs fraud detection by machine learning (ML) techniques. The limited availability of manually inspected ground truth data makes it essential for the ML approach to generalize well on unseen data. However, current customs fraud detection models are not well suited or designed for this setting. In this work, we propose GraphFC (Graph neural networks for Customs Fraud), a model-agnostic, domain-specific, graph neural network based customs fraud detection model that is designed to work in a real-world setting with limited ground truth data. Extensive experimentation using real customs data from two countries demonstrates that GraphFC generalizes well over unseen data and outperforms various baselines and other models by a large margin.