SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR DETECTING RELATIONS BETWEEN UNKNOWN MERCHANTS AND MERCHANTS WITH A KNOWN CONNECTION TO FRAUD

An example merchant fraud system may include an automated system for collecting contextual relationship information, plus a routine for analyzing additional data related to sanctions. The system may also include an automated analysis summary routine for creating condensed information subsets or graphlets containing information about sanction entities, some of which can be entities themselves, organized in a data retrieval system, such that an automated relationship examination system can check data from transactions and automatically identify and flag potentially suspect relationship aspects. The system may issue a fraud warning and may review a flagged transaction cluster, accepting transactions when transaction cluster items do not contain links to a known bad entity. Based on a hit with a suspect entity, the breadth of the examined co-related items may be expanded, and if that expansion results in one or more suspect connections, a transaction is rejected and sent for further review.