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Electricity consumer dishonesty is a problem faced by all power utilities. Finding efficient measurements for detecting fraudulent electricity consumption has been an active research area in recent years. This paper presents a new approach towards nontechnical loss (NTL) detection in power utilities using an artificial intelligence based technique, support vector machine (SVM). The main motivation of this study is to assist Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) Sdn. Bhd. in peninsular Malaysia to reduce its NTLs in the distribution sector due to abnormalities and fraud activities, i.e., electricity theft. The fraud detection model (FDM) developed in this research study preselects suspected customers to be inspected onsite fraud based on irregularities in consumption behavior. This approach provides a method of data mining, which involves feature extraction from historical customer consumption data. This SVM based approach …