Email Hoax Detection System Using Levenshtein Distance Method

Hoaxes are non-malicious viruses. They live on deceiving human’s perception by conveying false claims as truth. Throughout history, hoaxes have actually able to influence a lot of people to the extent of tarnishing the victim’s image and credibility. Moreover, wrong and misleading information has always been a distortion to a human’s growth. Some hoaxes were created in a way that they can even obtain personal data by convincing the victims that those data were required for official purposes. Hoaxes are different from spams in a way that they masquerade themselves through the address of those related either directly or indirectly to us. Most of the time, they appear as a forwarded message and sometimes from legit companies. This paper addresses this issue by developing a hoax detection system by incorporating text matching method using Levenshtein Distance measure. The proposed model is used to identify text-based hoax emails. Sensitivity and specificity are used to evaluate the accuracy of the system in identifying hoax emails.