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This simple equation has exposed major financial fraud. If you check the first digit of numbers in real-world data, like bank transactions, you’d expect digits 1 through 9 to appear equally. But they don’t. By Benford's law, smaller digits appear more often, and 1 shows up about 30% of the time. As numbers grow (1–9, 10–99, 100–999), leading digits don’t distribute evenly—they follow a logarithmic pattern. Since fraudsters often invent numbers assuming equal distribution, their data can violate this law, making manipulation easier to detect.