Detecting corporate fraud using Benford’s law

Note: This is a silly application. Don’t take anything seriously. Benford’s law describes a phenomenon where numbers in any data series will exhibit patterns in their first digit. For instance, if you took a list of the 1,000 longest rivers of Mongolia, or the average daily calorie consumption of mammals, or the wealth distribution of German soccer players, you will on average see that these numbers start with “1” about 30% of the time. I won’t attempt at proving this, but essentially it’s a res...

Submit