Aug 2026· International Journal of Science and Research Archive· Vol 20, pp. 030-041· 0 citations
TL;DR
It is argued that voice cloning constitutes a force multiplier that will erode voice familiarity, the last perceptual defense available to targets, and expand the pretext space from institutional to personal impersonation in Ghana.
Abstract
Mobile money has become the financial backbone of Ghana, with transaction values reaching several trillion cedis annually and active accounts numbering in the tens of millions. This scale has attracted a parallel surge in fraud, much of it perpetrated through voice phishing (vishing): unsolicited telephone calls in which fraudsters impersonate telecommunications providers to manipulate subscribers into surrendering credentials or authorizing transfers. This paper reviews the state of vishing-enabled mobile money fraud in Ghana, synthesizing regulator data, industry reporting, documented case typologies, and the academic literature on social engineering and mobile money security. It organizes the dominant attack scripts - security-verification, loyalty-reward, misdirected-payment, and SIM-swap pretexts - into a common four-stage pattern of impersonation, pretext, manipulation, and extraction, and interprets this pattern through routine activity theory and persuasion theory. The paper then examines an escalating threat: the maturation of AI voice cloning, which can now replicate a target voice from seconds of audio, and which controlled studies show human listeners cannot reliably detect. Because Ghanaian vishing already succeeds using ordinary human voices, the paper argues that voice cloning constitutes a force multiplier that will erode voice familiarity, the last perceptual defense available to targets, and expand the pretext space from institutional to personal impersonation. The review contributes a consolidated threat taxonomy, a theoretically grounded attack model, and a research and policy agenda for providers, regulators, and awareness programs in Ghana and comparable mobile-money-dependent economies.
Mobile money is critical financial infrastructure in Tanzania, but impersonation-based fraud can bypass technical safeguards by inducing users to authorise payments themselves. This study examined the techniques, patterns, and vulnerabilities facilitate impersonation-based fraud and the factors predicting user compliance with fraudulent instructions in Tanzania. A mixed-methods design combined a survey of 231 active mobile money users in Dar es Salaam and Kibaha, eight key informant interviews and a review of regulatory and industry documents. Impersonation attempts were pervasive, with 72.3% of users targeted and 86.2% of those targeted were repeatedly. Attackers requested PIN in only 0.6% of cases but inducing 98.8% to send money themselves. Among targeted users, 74.3% complied, and 97.6% of compliers lost money. Logistic regression identified trust in providers-appearing communications as the only significant unique predictor of compliance (OR = 2.50). Users strongly preferred transaction-context safeguards, with 93.1% wanting cancellation capability and 87.4% wanting more verification time. Impersonation-based mobile money fraud is primarily an authorised-payment problem rooted in trust exploitation. Mitigation should therefore strengthen safeguards at the point of payment authorisation
Gregory Aloyce, C. Budoya, G. Tesha· East African Journal of Info...· 0 citations
Mobile money has become the dominant channel through which ordinary Africans store, send and receive value, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for roughly two-thirds of the more than two trillion United States dollars that flowed through mobile money wallets worldwide in 2025 (GSMA, 2026). The same architecture that has delivered this expansion in financial inclusion, namely agent networks, USSD interfaces, SIM-based identity and near-instant settlement, has also produced a distinctive fraud ecology that conventional forensic accounting and audit methodologies, developed for formal corporate environments in high-income economies, are poorly equipped to address. Drawing on regulatory data from the Bank of Ghana, industry reporting from the GSMA, and the scholarly literature on fraud examination and mobile financial services, this article maps the principal typologies of mobile money fraud, interrogates the limits of the fraud triangle and its successors when transposed into informal, cash-adjacent and agent-mediated economies, and proposes a five-pillar context-sensitive framework for forensic accounting and digital auditing of mobile money ecosystems. The framework treats the agent, rather than the corporate entity, as a primary unit of audit attention, integrates behavioural and social engineering evidence into the forensic process, and anchors evidentiary practice in the statutory regimes governing electronic transactions and cybersecurity in African jurisdictions. The article closes with implications for practitioners, regulators and researchers.
Gaduga Godwin· International Journal of inn...· 0 citations
Identity theft online-based financial fraud represents two novel threats to India's digital economy, impacting millions of citizens each year while placing additional burdens for investigation and prosecution upon government institutions. Although the Information Technology Act, 2000 and more recent amendments provide patchily comprehensive legislative frameworks for addressing cybercrime, law enforcement is piecemeal, poorly resourced and in many cases ex post defectively insufficient. Through a qualitative analysis of judicial pronouncements, regulatory mechanisms and empirical enforcement data, this paper argues that structural obstacles thwart effective implementation of cyber laws. By examining the cases of landmark judgments including Anupam Khanna v. Union of India and Rajesh v. State of Haryana, the research finds significant enforcement gaps along multiple axes: (i) a lack of investigative capacity with only 8,000-10,000 trained cybercrime officers nationally (ii) systemic jurisdictional fragmentation leading to coordination failures between state and central agencies (iii) ineffective digital evidence management protocols in violation of forensic standards; numerous victims report post-trauma effect under compulsion to withdraw prosecution; fourthly by analysis which found inadequate international mutual legal assistance response mechanisms. Home affairs ministry data on cybercrime using the new definition shows stagnation, with conviction rates stuck at 14.2% for such cases, and victim fund recovery rates less than 10%. The conclusion of the paper is that these deficiencies cannot be solved through legislative reform. Rather, specialized district-level cybercrime units, mandatory investigator training, victim compensation schemes, expedited international cooperation protocols, and centralized digital evidence repositories serve as essential preconditions for converting symbolic frameworks into justice mechanisms where civil obligation meets operational reality in the case of identity theft.
Edgar Rajdayal Allan, M. S. Hanspal· International Journal of Hum...· 0 citations
From a discriminated approach, this study examined cryptocurrencies and fraud with a focus on audit trail and regulatory slack. The is anchored on the rapid growth of cryptocurrencies in the global financial systems with their unique attributes of being decentralized, fast, and borderless transaction platforms. While these innovations have improved financial inclusion and efficiency, they have concomitantly enacted new opportunities for fraud and regulatory challenges. Thus, from a qualitative approach, a content analysis of the open-source current literature was deployed to glean evidence-driven insight. It was observed that while cryptocurrencies serve as alternative investment growth and wealth storage means, they are highly vulnerable to fraud, due to anonymity, lack of centralized control, and rapid technological growth. Therefore, the structural characteristics of cryptocurrencies precinct, significantly weakening traditional control mechanisms and creating opportunities for fraudulent exploitation. Also, blockchain technology which anchors the crypto world creates digital bread crumbs that often fissile out depending on the technological prowess of the perpetrator, enacting difficulties in the audit trail. These have serious implications along theoretical, policy and practical lines. Therefore, the study recommends achieving an optimal effective mitigation of cryptocurrencies downsides within the espoused thematic focus of the study requires a holistic and integrated approach that combines strong regulatory frameworks, advanced technological tools, institutional capacity building, and increased public awareness, as no single mechanism is sufficient to address the complexity and dynamic nature of fraud in digital financial systems.
S. Ogoun, Festus Emeke Ogwu· Accounting· 0 citations
Internet lottery, as one of the modern manifestations of gambling within cyberspace, has gained particular importance from the perspective of criminal law and financial crimes due to its reliance on chance, monetary payment, and digital structure. The expansion of communication technologies, ease of internet access, and development of electronic payment instruments have caused this phenomenon to emerge on a large scale, often with transnational characteristics. The present study, adopting a descriptive–analytical approach, examines the possibility of committing crimes such as fraud, money laundering, and unlawful acquisition of property through internet lottery platforms, while also attempting to analyze the legal status of this phenomenon within the Iranian criminal justice system. In this regard, the study first investigates the fundamental characteristics of internet lotteries, including their basis in games of chance, dependence on technical instruments, transnational nature, necessity of financial value transfer, and the absence of direct participant involvement in the process of determining winners. Subsequently, the criminalization of behaviors associated with internet lotteries under Iranian criminal law is analyzed, including agreements for gambling, participation in lotteries, organization of prize drawings, establishment and management of virtual platforms, as well as the production and support of related technological tools. The findings indicate that although Iranian criminal law does not recognize an independent criminal title specifically for “internet lottery,” a range of related criminal offenses may encompass various forms of conduct in this field. The study further demonstrates that, under certain circumstances, internet lottery may serve as a means for perpetrating fraud or unlawful acquisition of property, and in legal systems where gambling is lawful, it may even provide opportunities for exploitation in money laundering processes.
Peyman Rostami, M. Saed, Mohsen Rahami· The Encyclopedia of Comparat...· 0 citations
Telegram plays a pivotal role in cryptocurrency communication and has been repeatedly associated with coordinated schemes, such as pump-and-dump manipulation. However, existing studies typically focus on known manipulation chats or a limited set of cryptocurrencies, leaving open the question of how Telegram is leveraged for mass promotional activity (shilling) at scale. Moving beyond these limitations, this work analyzes the interplay between information flows and market activity across public Telegram channels. To this end, we propose a scalable framework that (i) classifies crypto-related messages using a fine-tuned encoder model to filter semantic noise, (ii) detects anomalous spikes in cryptocurrency mentions via adaptive thresholding, and (iii) validates temporal associations between social bursts and market movements using quasi-experimental econometric methods (RDD and DiD). We apply this framework to one year of public Telegram data (14,499 channels and over 20 million messages) aligned with transaction data for more than 17,000 cryptocurrencies. Our analysis identifies 47 events consistent with potential pump-and-dump activity and 73 sustained market reactions, showing that manipulative signals are characterized by extreme temporal synchronization and precede price movements by seconds. Notably, psycholinguistic analysis reveals that pump-and-dump messages are linguistically indistinguishable from organic discussions, highlighting the limits of text-based detection alone. Finally, we estimate the cumulative financial volume of detected pump-and-dump events to exceed $200 million and release a public cryptocurrency dictionary and a fine-tuned classifier to support future research.
F. Moura, Giordano Paoletti, C. Ferreira et al.· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
