The abnormal state caused by the manipulation of smart meters will not only lead to serious economic losses, but also lead to the misjudgment of operation state of power grid, which affects the security of power grid. Based on super state hidden Markov (SSHM) model, a method for detecting and locating the operation behaviors of smart meters is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the super state is introduced into the hidden Markov model, and an improved Viterbi algorithm is given based on the sparsity of the transfer matrix and observation matrix in SSHM model, which can reduce the difficulty of data storage and measurement. Secondly, key performance parameters of model are evaluated and optimized by the data set containing typical manipulation behavior of smart meters, thus a high-performance SSHM model is established. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is compared with other methods through an example of manipulation behavior analysis, the case study proves that the proposed method is an effective means to detect the abnormal state and locate the rigged behaviors of smart meters with high accuracy.