The decentralized and anonymous nature of Ethereum makes it a prime target for phishing scams. These scams account for nearly 50% of all blockchain-related fraud, thereby causing a substantial financial loss and eroding user trust. Unlike conventional phishing, Ethereum phishing users exploit user anonymity, lack of awareness, and market-driven dynamics to deceive normal users. Despite of a plethora of research in this direction, there is a lack of a rigorous and comprehensive survey which can fortify an insightful comparison of the existing works and provide a concrete future research guidance. To this end, this paper presents a systematic review of 90 studies published between 2020 and 2024, offering the following novel contributions, (1) Structured Taxonomy: We introduce a structured three-fold taxonomy that classifies existing methods into feature engineering-based, representation learning-based, and fusion-based frameworks. (2) Theoretical Analysis: Through theoretical analysis, we evaluate these approaches against the critical research challenges, such as rapid network dynamism, data leakage, and network sparsity and provide a comparative mapping of novel techniques adopted across the studies. (3) Empirical Evaluation: We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of 14 representative models over multiple public datasets to assess their robustness under varying data conditions. The findings indicate that while feature-based models are more interpretable, they struggle with temporal adaptability; representation learning approaches, particularly GNN-based models, capture complex behavioral patterns but are computationally demanding and less explainable. Fusion methods demonstrate the most balanced trade-off between accuracy, scalability, and interpretability. (4) Future Research Guidance: Finally, we identify still persisting issues such as network sparsity, behavioral volatility, and scalability, and outline future research directions emphasizing temporal graph reasoning, self-supervised fusion, and explainable AI for developing transparent and deployable phishing detection frameworks on Ethereum.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) serve as a representative form of digital asset ownership and have attracted numerous investors, creators, and tech enthusiasts in recent years. However, related fraud activities, especially phishing scams, have caused significant property losses. There are many graph analysis methods to detect malicious scam incidents, but no research on the transaction patterns of the NFT scams. Therefore, to fill this gap, we are the first to systematically explore NFT phishing frauds through graph analysis, aiming to comprehensively investigate the characteristics and patterns of NFT phishing frauds on the transaction graph. During the research process, we collect transaction records, log data, and security reports related to NFT phishing incidents published on multiple platforms. After collecting, sanitizing, and unifying the data, we construct a transaction graph and analyze the distribution, transaction features, and interaction patterns of NFT phishing scams. We find that normal transactions on the blockchain accounted for 96.71% of all transactions. Although phishing-related accounts accounted for only 0.94% of the total accounts, they appeared in 8.36% of the transaction scenarios, and their interaction probability with normal accounts is significantly higher in large-scale transaction networks. Moreover, NFT phishing scammers often carry out fraud in a collective manner, targeting specific accounts, tend to interact with victims through multiple token standards, have shorter transaction cycles than normal transactions, and involve more multi-party transactions. This study reveals the core behavioral features of NFT phishing scams, providing important references for the detection and prevention of NFT phishing scams in the future.
In today’s technologically advancing world, many fields from finance to healthcare and education are shifting toward a digital and decentralized format. A significant transformation is underway with the currency of the masses. Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow users to generate fungible tokens anonymously through smart contracts. However, these features also facilitate illicit transactions and cybercrimes like fraud, phishing, and money laundering. The proposed work explores the identification of suspicious transactions on the Ethereum blockchain by leveraging advanced machine-learning techniques. An Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier is optimized for spotting unauthorized or malicious transactions, exploring features like transaction patterns and value anomalies. Feature scaling and log transformations normalize skewed distributions, while rigorous model training and hyperparameter tuning enhance the system's precision, recall, and overall accuracy. Other aids, such as feature importance rankings, precision-recall curves, and diagnostic statistics, provide useful information on fraud patterns. Evaluation of the model shows that integrating cost-sensitive learning significantly reduces false positives, from 51 to 44, representing a 13.7% decrease, which enhances practical usability by minimizing false alerts and manual verification efforts. Although there was a slight increase in false negatives (from 14 to 15), the overall classification accuracy improved. The model demonstrated strong performance in managing class imbalance which is common in fraud detection contexts.
Jianlong Xu, C. F. Xu, Rongtao Zhang, Feixiang Diao · 5 authors
With the wide application of blockchain technology in finance, IoT, healthcare, and other fields, phishing scams have emerged as a growing security threat. Existing detection methods often lack in-depth modeling of the directional properties of transaction flows and struggle to effectively capture diverse transaction behaviors, directional relationships, and key neighbor dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose TGAT-MPGCN, a direction-aware phishing detection model that constructs three complementary first-order subgraphs, a sending graph, a receiving graph, and a bidirectional graph to explicitly capture transaction directionality. By integrating a graph-attention mechanism with weighted neighbor aggregation, the model enhances feature learning. Experimental evaluations on an Ethereum transaction dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our approach, achieving an accuracy of 97.21%, an AUC of 0.9721, an F1-score of 0.9719, a recall of 0.9629, and a precision rate of 98.11%, significantly outperforming traditional detection methods. This study offers a practical and scalable solution for accurate phishing detection in blockchain transaction networks.
The detection of illicit cryptocurrency transactions remains a significant challenge due to the extreme class imbalance and limited generalization capabilities of machine learning models applied to Anti–Money Laundering (AML) data. In the widely used Elliptic dataset, illicit transactions represent less than 2% of all nodes, creating a high-risk setting in which models can achieve deceptively high training accuracy while failing to meaningfully identify malicious behavior. This study examines the behavior of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) under these constraints and emphasizes the limitations rather than the performance of the approach. Instead of treating the model’s high training accuracy as a success, we demonstrate how imbalance, structural sparsity, and label noise impede reliable learning. We evaluate the model with and without common imbalance-handling strategies including class weighting and focal lossand illustrate that performance remains unstable. Furthermore, we investigate the explainability of the model using GNNExplainer, showing example subgraphs and salient features for known illicit nodes, and discuss their alignment with money-laundering patterns such as fan-out and transaction mixing. Our findings underscore the difficulties of applying GNNs to heavily imbalanced AML datasets and highlight the need for improved modeling strategies, semi-supervised techniques, and more robust explainability methods for real-world financial crime detection.
The rapid expansion of digital banking ecosystems has intensified the demand for real-time fraud detection architectures capable of operating at cloud scale.As financial transactions increasingly traverse mobile platforms, API-driven services, embedded finance channels, and cross-border payment networks, fraud patterns have become more dynamic, decentralized, and behaviorally complex.This shift has exposed the limitations of legacy rule-based systems, which lack the adaptability, latency tolerance, and threatintelligence integration required to counter emerging risks.To address these challenges, cloud-native risk orchestration layers have emerged as a foundational component of next-generation fraud detection, delivering high-throughput data ingestion, elastic compute, and intelligent decisioning frameworks suited for modern digital banking environments.At a broader level, cloud-native risk orchestration unifies distributed event streams, machine-learning scoring engines, and policy-management modules within a scalable, microservices-based architecture.This enables fraud systems to process high-velocity transactional, behavioral, and device-identity signals with millisecond latency.As the narrative narrows, the paper explores how real-time fraud detection leverages cloud services such as serverless functions, container orchestration, distributed caching, and streaming analytics to enable adaptive detection pipelines.It further examines how federated intelligence, feature stores, and continuous learning loops enhance model accuracy while maintaining compliance with privacy and data-residency requirements.At its core, the proposed framework emphasizes explainability, risk transparency, and operational resilience incorporating alert-triage routing, anomaly-suppression mechanisms, decision traceability, and integration with case-management workflows.By combining cloud-native design principles with advanced fraud analytics, the paper outlines a comprehensive blueprint for financial institutions seeking to modernize their risk-management stack.This unified approach offers a path toward scalable, real-time, and intelligence-driven fraud prevention that adapts to evolving threats while supporting regulatory compliance and customer trust.
Jennifer Bala, Sikiru O. SUBAIRU, Noel M. DOGONYARO, Joseph A. OJENIYI · 5 authors
Blockchain technology, particularly Ethereum, has revolutionized decentralized finance by enabling transparent, secure, and programmable smart contracts. However, these same features have created avenues for financial crimes such as Ponzi schemes, where fraudulent actors exploit pseudonymity and the absence of centralized oversight to deceive investors. This study develops an optimized hybrid detection model that combines eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to identify Ponzi schemes in Ethereum transaction networks. The model integrates XGBoost’s capability for structured feature learning with GRU’s temporal sequence modeling to capture both static and dynamic behavioral patterns of smart contracts. Using a dataset of 3,866 labeled Ethereum contracts obtained from Kaggle, the research employed advanced preprocessing, temporal sequence enrichment, and class balancing through SMOTE-TS to mitigate data imbalance. Bidirectional optimization, incorporating attention-enhanced GRUs and Bayesian hyperparameter tuning for XGBoost, further improved learning performance and generalization. The model was evaluated using precision, recall, F1-score, ROC-AUC, and PR-AUC, achieving higher detection accuracy of 99% (F1-score = 0.945, ROC-AUC = 0.983) than standalone XGBoost or GRU models. Results demonstrate the hybrid model’s superior ability to detect temporal and statistical anomalies, reducing false negatives and improving early detection of fraudulent contracts. The approach contributes a scalable and interpretable framework for real-time Ponzi detection in blockchain ecosystems. This research not only enhances the reliability of Ethereum’s financial ecosystem but also offers regulators and developers a novel tool for proactive fraud prevention. Future work could extend this framework to multi-chain detection systems and real-time forensic monitoring.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique digital assets that play an increasingly important role in decentralized markets, supporting new forms of ownership, valuation, and exchange. Their inherently multimodal structure, which encompasses visual content, metadata, and trading history, has led to a growing academic interest in modeling NFT pricing and market behavior. However, existing research is limited by the lack of comprehensive datasets that unify these modalities with consistent formatting and longitudinal coverage. To address this gap, we introduce MultiNFT, a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising 50 curated profile picture (PFP) NFT collections, including 523,020 unique assets and 2.38 million transaction records from April 2021 to September 2025. MultiNFT integrates standardized images, structured metadata, and time-series trading data, along with rarity scores and aesthetic features, offering a unified foundation for multimodal learning and NFT analytics. Unlike prior datasets that focus on visual similarity or static snapshots, MultiNFT captures evolving valuation dynamics across market cycles and connects them to trait-level characteristics. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset through three case studies, including within-collection rarity-price analysis, visual feature clustering across collections, and quantifying feature contributions in a comprehensive pricing model. By bridging computer vision, behavioral modeling, and financial forecasting, MultiNFT supports a wide range of interdisciplinary research and practical use cases. The dataset is publicly available and is intended to promote reproducible experimentation and further exploration of the mechanisms driving value in digital asset ecosystems.
The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has increased the risk of fraud and market manipulation. This study introduces a method for detecting wash trading in the NFT marketplace using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) applied to Ethereum blockchain transaction data. We constructed a heterogeneous graph, used Depth-First Search for labelling, and extracted graph features, including PageRank and degree centrality. We evaluate various classification models: Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN), and Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Neural Network (HeteroGCN). The results show that GNN models, particularly the feature-enhanced HeteroGCN, exhibit superior performance compared to featureless models and traditional tabular baselines. The key contribution of this study is that PageRank and Degree Centrality features significantly improve the accuracy of identifying transactions involved in market manipulation.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that provides pseudo-anonymity among participants to maintain privacy. However, malicious actors utilise this property to hide their illegal rewards received through cyber attacks, dark market trades, money laundering and Ponzi schemes. The recent confiscation by the FBI of more than $4 million USD worth of bitcoin from the ‘Silk Road’ dark marketplace indicates the scale of the problem faced by financial regulators and law enforcement authorities. Analysing and identifying harmful actors is, therefore, necessary to regulate the transactions of digital assets. Machine learning models can assist in detecting patterns and correlations between the actors in blockchain networks that may not be apparent through traditional methods. In blockchain networks, the number of actors linked to illegal activities is significantly smaller than that of regular activities. Also, only very limited labelled transaction data is available about these malicious actors. These limitations make it harder to train supervised learning models to provide real-time proactive responses. This article represents a pioneering effort in thoroughly examining the different unsupervised learning methods for clustering suspicious behaviour of actors within blockchain networks. The proposed unsupervised learning-based analysis considers metadata and interconnectivity information of blockchain transactions. The metadata contains time-based and amount-based information. Interconnectivity data represents centrality measures and embedding vectors of the blockchain network. The quality of the identified clusters is validated using internal and external cluster validation measures. The validation results were used to identify influential features using the eXplainable AI technique Shapley (ShAP) values. The results reveal that the features related to the spending and receiving transactions strongly influenced cluster identification. Overall, the centroid-based and connectivity-based approaches identified well-separated clusters for metadata and centrality-based features of blockchain transactions.
Son, Do Hai, Hieu, Le Vu, Khoa, Tran Viet, Alem, Yibeltal F. · 8 authors
Blockchain technology has experienced rapid growth and has been widely adopted across various sectors, including healthcare, finance, and energy. However, blockchain platforms remain vulnerable to a broad range of cyberattacks, particularly those aimed at exploiting transactions and smart contracts (SCs) to steal digital assets or compromise system integrity. To address this issue, we propose a novel and effective framework for detecting cyberattacks within blockchain systems. Our framework begins with a preprocessing tool that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to transform key features of blockchain transactions into image representations. These images are then analyzed through vision-based analysis using Vision Transformers (ViT), a recent advancement in computer vision known for its superior ability to capture complex patterns and semantic relationships. By integrating NLP-based preprocessing with vision-based learning, our framework can detect a wide variety of attack types. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy (achieving 99.5%) and robustness in cyberattack detection for blockchain transactions and SCs.
Blockchain technologies have profoundly transformed information systems by providing decentralized infrastructures that enhance transparency, security, and traceability. Ethereum, in particular, supports smart contracts and facilitates the development of decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and Web3 applications. However, its openness also enables illicit activities, including fraud and money laundering, through anonymous wallets. Identifying wallets involved in large transfers or abnormal transactional patterns is therefore critical to ecosystem security. This study proposes an AI-based framework employing XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost to detect suspicious Ethereum wallets, achieving test accuracies between 95.83% and 96.46%. The system provides near real-time predictions for individual or recent wallet addresses using a pre-trained XGBoost model. To improve interpretability, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) visualizations are integrated, highlighting the contribution of each feature. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of AI-driven methods in monitoring and securing Ethereum transactions against fraudulent activities.
Traditional centralized systems often fail to prevent fraud and ensure data integrity, especially as cyber threats grow more complex. This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework enhanced with artificial intelligence to address these limitations. Blockchain provides secure, tamper-proof storage and smart contract–based access control, while AI enables realtime anomaly detection by analyzing behavioral patterns. The system is built using Ethereum smart contracts and machine learning models, with a modular architecture connecting frontend, backend, and AI components. Evaluation shows over 92% accuracy in fraud detection, efficient response times, and reliable audit trails. The approach proves scalable and suitable for sensitive sectors such as healthcare and finance, offering a secure, intelligent, and decentralized solution for modern data protection
Gyuyeon Na, Minjung Park, Hyeonjeong Cha, Soyoun Kim · 9 authors
Blockchain transaction networks are complex, with evolving temporal patterns and inter-node relationships. To detect illicit activities, we propose a hybrid GCN-GRU model that captures both structural and sequential features. Using real Bitcoin transaction data (2020-2024), our model achieved 0.9470 Accuracy and 0.9807 AUC-ROC, outperforming all baselines.
Ali M. Emran, Md Kamrul Islam -, Md Ashraful Islam Nayem -, Md Rubel · 5 authors
Abstract: Exploring GNNs as a cutting-edge approach to real-time detection of online money transfer fraud is the focus of this work. P2P payment systems, mobile money platforms, and decentralized financial infrastructures (DeFi) have all experienced explosive growth over the past decade due to their simplicity, speed, and affordability. Identity fraud, synthetic account misuse, coordinated fraud rings that exploit systemic vulnerabilities, and transaction laundering are some of the new types of fraud that can occur in these platforms, despite their desirability. In situations where fraud is predictable, isolated, and statistically distinct, logistic regression, rule-based algorithms, and standard ML models like Random Forests and SVMs have all proved effective in detecting it. Modern, hyper-connected, real-time financial ecosystems are seeing an uptick in non-linear, relational, and temporal fraud patterns, which these tactics struggle to combat. Because of their inherent bias, they fail to recognize the interconnected structural and relational processes that may point to coordinated fraud. The graph-like qualities of monetary exchanges, where elements (like IP addresses, users, and devices) are organically linked through edges that stand for transactions or relationships, are utilized by Graph Neural Networks to give a paradigm shift, on the other hand. Generalized neural networks (GNNs) are crucial for uncovering intricate fraud schemes because they represent these interactions as a graph structure that permits data to travel and accumulate across nodes. Because of this, the model may take global and regional effects into consideration. Relational learning excels when other methods fail, such as when trying to detect suspicious clusters of transactions, multi-hop collusions, or fraudulent subnetworks using separate features. In order to implement this method, we constructed an entirely new fraud detection system utilizing GNNs. Node feature engineering, graph generation, classification heads, message-passing layers, and a real-time processing optimized pipeline are all parts of it. We were able to empirically evaluate our technique using a real-world transactional dataset that was acquired from a leading financial services provider. As is typical in fraud detection tasks, the dataset had a highly skewed class distribution, which impacted both memory and accuracy. With an F1-score of 0.78, accuracy of 98.7 percent, precision of 0.81%, and recall of 0.76%, the model nevertheless performed admirably. The model's ability to detect fraudulent behaviors while maintaining dependable operations in the real world is demonstrated by these measures. Beyond its implications for technological performance, this study will help achieve broader aims in regulation, ethics, and national security. A number of federal agencies have issued advisories highlighting the need for strong, intelligent, and real-time fraud monitoring systems to safeguard national financial systems from fraudulent exploitation. These agencies include the DOJ, FinCEN, and DHS. Compliance with the USA PATRIOT Act and the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) is of the utmost importance to financial institutions and fintech enterprises. As stated in the National Strategy to Combat Terrorist and Other Illicit Financing, they also want AI-driven surveillance systems to be resilient and explainable. This national goal is helped by our study, which provides a scalable, interpretable, and performance-driven GNN-based system. Along with helping with auditability, model explainability, and compliance reporting, all of which are crucial for regulated businesses, this strategy also helps with effective fraud detection. Integrating our suggested architecture for decentralized, privacy-preserving fraud detection into online learning extensions can further improve their functionality. Over time, these extensions can be integrated with federated learning systems and streaming data platforms. This work puts GNNs in a position to become a new weapon in the fight against digital payment fraud by combining cutting-edge graph representation learning with cybersecurity regulations and goals for financial integrity. Thanks to our research's careful analysis, innovative architecture, and adherence to statutory criteria, future financial systems will be reliable, safe, and robust. Additionally, it resolves a significant technical matter.
With the shift from Centralized Finance (CeFi) to Decentralized Finance (DeFi), financial transactions have become trustless and self-executing through blockchain platforms, creating new opportunities while exposing the ecosystem to significant fraud risks. However, due to the lack of centralized oversight and the vulnerabilities in the blockchain platforms, DeFi transactions still face several security challenges, including fraud, identity theft, insider threats, and data breaches. Various methods, including regulatory frameworks, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) techniques, are employed to detect these threats, particularly fraud, in DeFi transactions. Although these approaches help identify fraudulent activities, they face challenges related to accuracy and zero-day attacks due to insufficient data and the complexity of emergingfraud patterns. This study presents a novel approach for detecting and profiling fraud attacks, including zero-day ones in DeFi transactions, thereby eliminating the reliance on wallet transaction history, a limitation that previous research has heavily depended on. The proposed approach leverages two key components: a novel analyzer named DeFiTransLyzer (V1.0) and an Advanced Genetic Algorithm (AGA) for fraud transaction profiling. DeFiTransLyzer extracts 79 features from transaction and wallet data. At the same time, the AGA incorporates advanced techniques, including Penalized Fitness Evaluation, Elite Retention Strategy, Dynamic Mutation Rate, and dynamic generation, to create precise fraud profiles. By focusing solely on transaction features, the model ensures that all fraudulent activities, including zero-day ones, initiated within the first transaction of a new account can be effectively detected, without relying on prior wallet activity. To address the scarcity of comprehensive validation datasets, we introduce BCCCDeFiFraudTrans-2025, which comprises 1,026,867 annotated Ethereum transaction samples from the DeFi ecosystem. Additionally, the study establishes two taxonomies for systematic classification, covering the literature on fraud detection and profiling methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior accuracy, precision, and efficiency while offering interpretability through its profiling mechanism. These promising outcomes highlight the potential of AGA profiling to enhance the detection and identification of fraudulent activities, including zero-day ones within DeFi transactions, contributing to the security and resilience of blockchainbased financial systems.
Este trabalho apresenta uma metodologia de detecção de contratos inteligentes do tipo mixers na rede Ethereum. Utilizou-se um modelo de aprendizado de máquina baseado em Random Forest, treinado com transações do Tornado Cash e balanceado com amostras de 100 endereços aleatórios não relacionados a mixers. O modelo foi treinado com dados de março de 2025 e validado em 29/10/2020, dia de alto volume de transações, identificando corretamente 3 endereços do Tornado Cash.
As Ethereum continues to gain traction as a leading blockchain platform, its open and decentralized nature has also made it an attractive target for fraudulent activities. This paper presents a machine learning-based approach to detect fraudulent Ethereum transactions by analyzing behavioral patterns within transaction data. Using a labeled dataset of Ethereum transactions, various classification algorithms such as Random Forest, XGBoost, and Support Vector Machines were trained and evaluated. The proposed system focuses on identifying anomalies and suspicious transaction behavior by extracting relevant features like gas usage, transaction value, and timing. Experimental results show that the model can achieve high accuracy and precision in distinguishing between legitimate and fraudulent transactions. This work contributes to the growing field of blockchain security by demonstrating the viability of intelligent fraud detection techniques and providing a framework that can be integrated into real-world applications.
Irum Matloob, Shoab Ahmed Khan, Bushra Bashir, Rukaiya Rukaiya · 6 authors
Healthcare recommendations and insurance have recently been one of the most emerging research areas in health informatics. The fraud in health insurance is becoming increasingly common day by day. To handle healthcare insurance fraud, there is an urgent need for an intelligent system that cannot only identify and monitor doctors' and hospitals' behavior regarding the health services they provide to patients but can also recommend doctors and hospitals to insured employees based on the quality of services they provided previously. This system creates patient and doctor profiles separately, based on their rating. The proposed system combines singular value decomposition (SVD), K-nearest neighbors based collaborative filtering (KNN-based CF), item-based collaborative filtering (Item-based CF), content-based filtering using term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and K-means clustering and probability distributions to recommend doctors and insurance plans. The system measures similarity scores between patients and doctors using cosine similarity, which helps to determine similarity scores and refine the recommendations. This study also uses blockchain technology to automate insurance claims reimbursement. The results are validated using real data from the employees of a local hospital. The system provides recommendations with a root mean square error (RMSE) value of 0.478 and a mean absolute error (MAE) value of 0.0422. The insurance plans developed using the proposed system have reduced the overall expenditure of the local hospital, with a reduction in total expenses. Blockchain technology further helps prevent healthcare fraud. In the proposed system, a healthcare insurance claims reimbursement system is built using smart contract technology on the Ethereum blockchain, ensuring security & transparency and lowering the number of healthcare frauds. The system includes roles for the insurance company, healthcare provider, and patients. It also provides a platform for claim submission, approval, or refusal. In Pakistan, no such system existed before recommending doctors from different hospitals based on their professional conduct or the good health services they provide.
Shilpa Kottapally, Sr. Software Development Engineer, Adjudication - Rxclaim developement Application, CVS Health, 2100 E lake cook road , Buffalo grove Illinois 60047, USA
International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering (A UGC Approved and indexed with DOI, ICI and Approved, DPI Digital Library) is one of the leading and growing open access, peer-reviewed, monthly, and scientific research journal for scientists, engineers, research scholars, and academicians, which gains a foothold in Asia and opens to the world, aims to publish original, theoretical and practical advances in Computer Science,Information Technology, Engineering (Software, Mechanical, Civil, Electronics & Electrical), and all interdisciplinary streams of Computing Sciences. It intends to disseminate original, scientific, theoretical or applied research in the field of Computer Sciences and allied fields. It provides a platform for publishing results and research with a strong empirical component. It aims to bridge the significant gap between research and practice by promoting the publication of original, novel, industry-relevant research.
The proliferation of FinTech platforms has transformed global financial systems by offering innovative, real-time services.However, this evolution has also expanded the surface area for cyber-enabled financial fraud, especially across multi-layered infrastructures comprising mobile banking apps, decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, digital wallets, and cloud-based services.Traditional machine learning and rule-based systems have demonstrated limited adaptability in detecting increasingly sophisticated attack vectors that span multiple digital layers.This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of explainable deep learning (XDL) models tailored to detect complex cyber-enabled fraud schemes across interconnected FinTech ecosystems.The study begins with an overview of the structural and technological evolution of FinTech infrastructure, followed by an examination of the most prevalent and emerging fraud typologies including synthetic identity fraud, account takeover, transaction laundering, and insider collusion.Emphasis is placed on the limitations of black-box AI models in high-stakes financial environments where interpretability is critical for regulatory compliance, stakeholder trust, and legal recourse.We introduce an explainable deep learning framework incorporating convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for behavioral biometrics, graph neural networks (GNNs) for multi-entity relationship mapping, and attention-based mechanisms for anomaly prioritization.The model integrates SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) and LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) to improve transparency without compromising predictive performance.Evaluation is conducted using real-world transaction data from anonymized FinTech institutions, with metrics highlighting accuracy, false positive reduction, and interpretability scores.The paper concludes by discussing policy implications, ethical considerations, and future research directions in explainable AI for secure financial innovation.