Fact
Real-world numbers start with 1 far more often than chance allows
About 30 per cent of the time. Tax authorities use this to catch fraud.
Benford’s law states that in many naturally occurring datasets spanning several orders of magnitude, the leading digit is 1 roughly 30 per cent of the time and 9 under 5 per cent. Fabricated figures tend to distribute leading digits evenly, so deviation from Benford is used as a red flag in forensic accounting and election auditing.