Name this paradox about most common first digits in numbers?

Question

I remember hearing about a paradox (not a real paradox, more of a surprising oddity) about frequency of the first digit in a random number being most likely 1, second most likely 2, etc. This was for measurements of seemingly random things, and it didn't work for uniformly generated pseudorandom numbers. I also seem to recall there was a case in history of some sort of banking fraud being detected because the data, which was fudged, was not adhering to this law. It was also generalisable so that it didn't matter what base number system you used, the measurements would be distributed in an analagous way. I've googled for various things trying to identify it but I just can't find it because I don't know the right name to search for. I would like to read some more about this subject, so if anyone can tell me the magic terms to search for I'd be grateful, thanks!

Answer 1

Just copied this from Wikipedia

Benford's law, also called the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation about the frequency distribution of leading digits in many real-life sets of numerical data. The law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading significant digit is likely to be small.^[1] For example, in sets that obey the law, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time. If the digits were distributed uniformly, they would each occur about 11.1% of the time.^[2] Benford's law also makes predictions about the distribution of second digits, third digits, digit combinations, and so on.