Digital fraud and sustainable development goals: Literacy as conditional protection

Digital fraud now travels through the same interfaces that make digital finance convenient, and financial and digital literacy is widely proposed as a remedy. However, research on why fraud matters for development, who bears its costs, and when literacy protects remains split across detection, behavioral, and governance traditions. This scoping review uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common vocabulary. Treating the SDG mappings that Scopus assigns to 180 digital-fraud studies as an external framing layer, it examines how framing relates to the mechanisms, at-risk groups, and remedies that studies report and reads its literacy studies closely. The SDG-framed literature focuses on four framings that are not interchangeable: fraud as a load on institutions (SDG 16), a threat to trust in digital infrastructure (SDG 9), a barrier to safe economic participation (SDG 8), and a source of unequal harm (SDG 10). Each points to a different remedy, and studies framed around inequality rarely signal who bears the costs of anti-fraud controls. In a small, cross-sectional evidence base, literacy is associated with lower victimization on average, but the protection is conditional: overconfidence is linked to higher victimization, those who would gain most may be least likely to acquire competence, and associations differ before, during, and after exposure. The paper derives testable propositions on literacy as conditional protection, on direct loss and institutional strain as separate registers of harm, and on post-event recovery as a distinct site where digital trust is rebuilt.