Inhibiting inappropriate communications between users involving transactions

摘要

Techniques are described for automatically identifying and inhibiting suspect electronic communications between users, such as for electronic communications that may reflect fraudulent activities by one or more of the users or that are otherwise inappropriate for one or more reasons. In some situations, the communications may relate to transactions in which the users are involved, such as for users that are buyers and sellers of items interacting via one or more electronic marketplaces. The communications may occur via a communication mechanism provided by an electronic marketplace that acts as an intermediary between the sender of a communication and the one or more intended recipients of the communication. The automatic identification of suspect communications that may be inappropriate includes automatically assessing the communications in one or more ways, and identified suspect communications and any associated inappropriate user activities may be inhibited in various ways.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method comprising:
obtaining, by one or more configured computing systems, a communication sent via an electronic marketplace by a sender user to an intended recipient user, the sender user and the intended recipient user being participants in the electronic marketplace who are engaged in activities related to a transaction via the electronic marketplace that involves transfer of one or more items, the communication being associated with the transaction, and the electronic marketplace being provided to facilitate interactions between a plurality of participants in the electronic marketplace; before providing the communication to the intended recipient user, applying, by the one or more configured computing systems, one or more fraud assessment tests to the communication to determine that possible fraudulent activity is suspected for the transaction with which the communication is associated; and in response to determining that the possible fraudulent activity is suspected for the transaction, taking, by the one or more configured computing systems, one or more actions to inhibit the possible fraudulent activities for the transaction, wherein the taking of the one or more actions includes one or more of holding the communication until a future time to allow further assessment of the communication at the future time based on additional information that is available at the future time, or modifying the communication before forwarding the modified communication to the intended recipient user.