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    <journal-meta>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">IJLTEMAS</journal-id>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>International Journal of Latest Technology in Engineering, Management &amp; Applied Science (IJLTEMAS)</journal-title>
        <abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">IJLTEMAS</abbrev-journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn pub-type="epub">2278-2540</issn>
      <publisher>
        <publisher-name>IJLTEMAS</publisher-name>
      </publisher>
    </journal-meta>

    <article-meta>
      <!-- IDs -->
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">414</article-id>
            <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.51583/IJLTEMAS.2026.150900063</article-id>
      
      <!-- Categories -->
            <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Robotic</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      
      <!-- Title -->
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Detecting Fake Products in African E-Commerce Markets: An Artificial Intelligence Framework Using a Tanzania-Informed Simulation</article-title>
      </title-group>

      <!-- Authors -->
      <contrib-group>
                <contrib contrib-type="author">
                    <name>
            <surname>Longo Mlelwa (PhD)</surname>
            <given-names>Kenneth</given-names>
          </name>
                              <aff>
            Senior Lecturer - ICT Department the Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania                        <country>Tanzania</country>
                      </aff>
                    
        </contrib>
              </contrib-group>

      <!-- Volume / Issue / Pages -->
            <volume>15</volume>
                  <issue>9</issue>
                        <fpage>1812</fpage>
            <lpage>1823</lpage>
            
      <!-- Dates -->
      <history>
                <date date-type="received">
          <day>13</day>
          <month>09</month>
          <year>2026</year>
        </date>
                        <date date-type="accepted">
          <day>18</day>
          <month>09</month>
          <year>2026</year>
        </date>
              </history>

            <pub-date pub-type="epub">
        <day>10</day>
        <month>10</month>
        <year>2026</year>
      </pub-date>
      
      <!-- DOI Self-URI -->
            <self-uri xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.51583/IJLTEMAS.2026.150900063"/>
      
      <!-- Keywords -->
            <kwd-group kwd-group-type="author">
                <kwd>African digital markets</kwd>
                <kwd>artificial intelligence</kwd>
                <kwd>counterfeit detection</kwd>
                <kwd>e-commerce</kwd>
                <kwd>machine learning</kwd>
                <kwd>simulation</kwd>
                <kwd>Tanzania</kwd>
              </kwd-group>
      
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        <sec>
      <title>Abstract</title>
      <p>The rapid expansion of e-commerce in Africa has increased consumer access to goods while also creating opportunities for counterfeit and misleading product listings. This study proposes a multi-signal artificial intelligence framework for counterfeit-product risk detection and evaluates it through a reproducible Tanzania-informed simulation rather than through direct observation of Tanzanian marketplace transactions. A synthetic dataset of 1,000 product listings was generated with a 70:30 genuine-to-counterfeit class ratio. Five marketplace signals were modelled: price deviation, seller reputation, image similarity, review sentiment, and description quality. The revised simulation protocol specifies the class-conditional distributions, contamination assumptions, random seed, train-test split, cross-validation strategy, hyperparameter search, and evaluation metrics. Four supervised classifiers - logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, and XGBoost - were compared. No raw product images were used to train a convolutional neural network; instead, image similarity was treated as a scalar signal that could in practice be produced by an upstream visual-comparison component. On a stratified 20% holdout set, logistic regression achieved 0.920 accuracy, 0.867 precision, 0.867 recall, 0.867 F1-score, and 0.950 ROC-AUC. Repeated stratified five-fold cross-validation produced mean accuracies of approximately 0.889-0.893 across the four models. The findings therefore support the technical feasibility of multi-signal screening under controlled simulated conditions, not operational validation in Tanzanian e-commerce. The paper concludes that future deployment should be validated with real African marketplace data, raw product imagery, network-level seller relationships, and explainable decision support for human moderators</p>
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