Senior Data Scientist – Fraud Detection & AI Application

At PureSpectrum, a Most Loved Workplace® certified employer in the Market Research space, Empowering insights professionals with agile market research technology..

Explore how AI 'agent' fraud emerged in 2025 and learn how PureScore™ 5.0 identifies session breaks to protect your data quality. As we enter the final month of the year, we pause to reflect on what 2025 has taught us about the fraud landscape. AI was consistently in the headlines as the new emerging threat in our industry; however, the story this year was not about an explosion of fraud; it was about its subtle shifts. We saw the usual unrealistically fast completes, nonsensical open ends, and the type of behavior that would quickly get labeled as 'poor quality', but we also saw nuances that didn’t fit the behavior we were used to. On July 17, 2025, OpenAI put out an announcement about its 'agent' mode, sparking concern among researchers that it may aid survey fraud. As the year progressed, numerous articles began referencing the capability of AI to take surveys fully autonomously. Although AI is capable of answering questions and can be very sophisticated, it is incapable of matching the real-world workflows and conversion paths inherent to our industry. In the months that followed, we partnered with clients to look into potential AI fraud in their surveys. We hypothesized AI agents were assisting fraudsters mid-survey once the session was initiated by a human. What we saw was that when that intervention occurred, there was a break in continuity mid-session. This is not a pervasive trend, but it is one to be aware of and one that we can combat. We developed a way to determine whether the behavior, location, and device had changed and how. PureScore™ 5.0 identifies the break in continuity. The implementation of PureScore™ 5.0 is a simple survey-level integration. The latest version of PureScore™ empowers researchers to see the full arc of the respondent’s journey and if their behavior suggests AI assistance. As an industry, we are continually striving to understand the risk of fraud and how to mitigate it. Quality will never be perfect. Fraud will continue to evolve, and we will continue to monitor it and adapt. Throughout December, we will delve into what we have learned about fraud this year, expose it, and explore how to move past it. We will cover what AI can and can’t do in survey environments and how to practically look at quality.

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