An interactive explorer for Benford's Law across real datasets

I learned about Benford's law over a decade ago, and I always found it beautiful and elegant. But surely, fraudsters have become more sophisticated by now. I wonder if you asked an AI to commit fraud, if it would be clever enough to avoid such mistakes.

I once did an application of Benford's Law to USDT transactions between crypto exchanges, which seemed to indicate some exchanges had mostly "organic" transactions and a handful of exchanges seemed to have heavy transaction volume of seemingly-random but not really random amounts, indicating some level of wash trading on those exchanges.

I'd recommend allowing 2 digit exploration. I've used it in the past when analyzing hard drive failure logical block addresses.

Neat! Benford’s Law was the first topic I dove into in undergrad math that got a minor publication. Given how well known it is for forensic accounting I’ve always wanted to look into convictions and see if the “average” fraudster has wised up and produces more realistic distributions.

Interesting that it was first discovered with noticing the “garden path” in the front pages of a book of logarithm tables (in 1881).

It's interesting how all base 10 numbers identify as non binary