Beyond Fraud Types: Guardian Severance and Relational Fraud Prevention in South Korea

Abstract Fraud prevention often responds to named scam types even when different scams rely on similar relational mechanisms. This study develops an ontology-informed relational framework for fraud prevention and applies it to five fraud types in South Korea. A structured cross-case analysis identifies a recurring five-stage relational core: trust construction, guardian severance, pressure creation, asset transfer, and concealment. Guardian severance—the offender’s removal or circumvention of people, institutions, or systems that could interrupt the fraud—appears across all five cases, although its implementation varies. The analysis also shows that Korean reforms have strengthened information sharing and transfer-stage intervention without targeting guardian relationships. The study therefore proposes guardian restoration as a security-design principle and distinguishes ontological representation from both crime scripts and graph-based fraud detection.