Graph Theory-Based Fraud Detection in Banking Check Transactions

Abstract

Traditional banking fraud detection systems rely on rule-based approaches that analyze individual transactions in isolation, failing to capture complex relationship patterns indicative of coordinated fraud schemes such as check-kiting and artificial credit score manipulation. We p resent our study, a novel similarity-based graph theory approach that constructs weighted networks between check issuers using Jaccard Similarity Index and employs advanced graph analysis to identify suspicious entity clusters without requiring complete transaction relationship data. Our approach combines Jaccard Similarity Index for behavioral pattern analysis (addressing payee information unavailability) with comprehensive graph analysis including centrality measures, community detection, and anomaly identification. Through comprehensive evaluation on real banking data containing 458,399 transactions from 121,647 unique issuers - the largest confirmed dataset in fraud detection literature - we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology. Following parameter optimization using grid search methodology (similarity threshold: 0.55, risk percentile: 0.75), our study achieves competitive detection rates in optimal configurations with an average F1-score of 0.447 (±0.164) and peak performance reaching an F1-score of 0.557, while providing superior network topology analysis with 0.923 clustering coefficient. The system operates under significant data privacy constraints, lacking personal identification information (names, account numbers, IDs) and complete payee data. Despite these limitations, our study outperforms traditional approaches by leveraging similarity-based indirect relationships, and we project that performance could reach 85-95% levels with complete data access. © 2025 IEEE.