Hybrid LSTM-Graph Neural Framework for Robust Financial Fraud Detection and Adversarial Resilience

Abstract

Financial institutions face significant challenges in detecting sophisticated money laundering patterns, such as smurfing and layering, due to extreme data imbalance (0.13% fraud rate) and evolving adversarial evasion tactics. This paper proposes FraudShield AI, a hybrid framework that integrates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with hand-crafted Graph Topological Features to capture both temporal sequences and structural relational context. By engineering network-centric features including PageRank Centrality, In-Degree dynamics, and a custom Flow Ratio, the system shifts the detection paradigm from isolated transaction analysis to network-level forensics. A Focal Loss objective is used to address class imbalance, and a dynamic thresholding mechanism is introduced to improve resilience against low-value smurfing attacks. Experimental evaluation on the PaySim dataset shows that the proposed hybrid model substantially outperforms Logistic Regression and XGBoost baselines in Precision, Recall, and F1-Score, particularly on hard-to-detect micro-transaction fraud patterns. An ablation study confirms the complementary contribution of both the temporal and topological components.