A Review of Artificial Intelligence for Financial Fraud Detection

Financial fraud has expanded rapidly with the growth of the digital economy, evolving from conventional transactional misconduct to more complex and data-intensive forms. Traditional rule-based detection methods are increasingly inadequate for addressing the scale, heterogeneity, and dynamic behavior of modern fraud. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a core tool in financial fraud detection research. This review systematically surveys AI-based financial fraud detection studies published between 2015 and 2025. It summarizes representative machine learning and deep learning approaches, including tree-based models, neural networks, and graph-based methods, and examines their applications in major fraud scenarios such as credit card fraud, loan fraud, and anti-money laundering. In addition, emerging research on cryptocurrency- and blockchain-related fraud is reviewed, highlighting the distinct challenges posed by decentralized transaction environments. Through a comparative analysis of methods, datasets, and evaluation practices, this review identifies persistent issues in the literature, including severe class imbalance, concept drift, limited access to labeled data, and trade-offs between detection performance and interpretability. Based on these findings, the paper discusses practical considerations for applied fraud detection systems and outlines future research directions from a data-centric and application-oriented perspective. This review aims to provide a structured reference for researchers and practitioners working on real-world financial fraud detection problems.