The Industrialisation of Fraud: Understanding Fraud in a Digital Era

This paper offers a novel conceptual framework for understanding fraud in the digital era by introducing the idea of industrialised fraud. Unlike existing literature that focuses on the mechanics of cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent fraud, this work situates fraud within the social, structural, technological and economic transformations of the digitalised economy. It argues that fraud is no longer an outlier but a systemic feature of unregulated digital markets, operating at scale and across borders. Through the analytical lenses of fraud’s footholds and fraud’s lifecycles, the paper reexamines fraud’s core legal and moral norms – means, purposes and fault. It demonstrates how they are being reshaped by the transactional contexts in which fraud is now designed, facilitated and perpetrated. This reconceptualisation provides a firmer foundation for principled debate on fraud governance and criminalisation in an era of rapid technological transformation.