Prevention and Control of Financial Fraud: a Scoping Review

In: European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research

Abstract

As awareness has grown internationally of the harms caused by financial fraud, there has been a concomitant increase in efforts to prevent and control it. Despite this growing awareness, the literature addressing measures against financial fraud has not yet been systematically reviewed or synthesised. On the basis of a scoping literature review, this study provides a structured overview of the literature on prevention and control measures targeting financial fraud (n = 159). We classify these measures on the basis of four functions specified by Maesschalck and Bertók (2009): "determining and defining," "guiding," "monitoring," and "enforcing." Looking at a period of just over 20 years, we see that a growing number of studies have been published on this topic, with most focusing on "monitoring" (k = 98) and the least on "enforcing" (k = 37). With 11.3% and 12.0% of the studies respectively, both criminology and Europe are less represented in the literature than expected. Most studies are cross-sectional, many are methodologically weak, and they all provide only limited information on the effectiveness or the costs of the anti-fraud measures. The literature is thus not up to the challenge of facing what has become one of the most frequent and threatening crimes worldwide. In the conclusion, we sketch an agenda for future research to help address this gap.