Mobile Money Fraud and Financial Integrity in Africa: Towards a Context-Sensitive Framework for Forensic Accounting and Digital Auditing

Abstract

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.