Taxonomy of fraud types in alternative finance using hybrid systematic review

Alternative finance platforms, including crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, equity-based platforms, and token-based fundraising mechanisms, have become important channels for financing entrepreneurial, social, and investment-oriented initiatives. Yet their reliance on digital intermediation, dispersed participation, and information asymmetry creates opportunities for fraud, undermining trust, investor protection, and platform sustainability. This study provides a systematic review of fraud detection and prevention in alternative finance, with crowdfunding emerging as the most extensively represented empirical domain. Methodologically, the paper combines a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review with a hybrid topic-modeling strategy that integrates neural topic modeling and probabilistic refinement, thereby supporting both transparent corpus selection and data-driven thematic synthesis. The findings show that Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and blockchain-based mechanisms are recurrently discussed as promising tools for detecting, preventing, or mitigating fraud. AI and ML approaches are mainly used to identify anomalies, suspicious textual patterns, behavioral signals, and transaction irregularities, while blockchain-based approaches are associated with transparency, traceability, smart contracts, and conditional fund release. The review also shows that fraud differs across alternative finance models, ranging from campaign misrepresentation and intentional and premeditated non-delivery in crowdfunding to borrower or platform misreporting in lending-based models and misleading disclosures or white-paper manipulation in ICO/STO contexts. A central challenge across the literature is the scarcity of labeled fraud data, which limits the use and benchmarking of supervised ML models. Overall, this study contributes by linking a reproducible hybrid SLR methodology to a structured synthesis of fraud types, platform-specific vulnerabilities, and AI-, ML-, and blockchain-based detection strategies in alternative finance.