Determinants of Financial Fraud Awareness among University Students

Lately, Malaysia has been experiencing an upward trend in financial fraud cases, not only targeting the ‘golden-aged’ people but also the vulnerable groups, such as university students. These cases could imply that students lack awareness of existing fraud schemes, exposing them to huge financial instability risks. Such risks motivate this study to delve into the three crucial factors leading to a lack of financial fraud awareness: anti-fraud education, attitude towards fraud, and defensiveness against fraud. This study targets 250 Malaysian university students to establish which factors contribute more to raising financial fraud awareness in those students and how they interact with each other. All three hypotheses derived from the proposed framework showed significant statistical results at 95% confidence. The outcomes of this study serve to reduce, in practice, the vulnerability of university students to financial scams by increasing their awareness. Such findings will clearly outline the determinants of awareness about financial fraud, thereby enlightening the policymakers with valuable insights that would be useful in crafting more effective detection and prevention strategies by providing critical insight into what influences financial fraud awareness among the youth and guidelines on the formulation of proactive measures against financial fraud. The three hypotheses underpinned by financial fraud theory, allowing and stimulating avenues for further exploration and intervention.