<![CDATA[Fraud remains a persistent governance problem across corporate, public-sector, and digital environments, yet research on how fraud is deterred is dispersed across governance, auditing, criminology, internal control, information systems, and regulatory scholarship. This systematic literature review integrates that fragmented evidence and develops a concise governance explanation of fraud deterrence. Following PRISMA 2020, records were identified through Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and supplementary Google Scholar searching; 249 studies met the final eligibility criteria. The evidence was coded across seven dimensions: corporate governance, forensic accounting and audit effectiveness, fraud theory, internal control and risk management, digital technologies and artificial intelligence, public-sector and institutional fraud, and legal enforcement, ethics, and behavioral factors. The synthesis shows that no single mechanism provides reliable deterrence across contexts. Board and audit-committee oversight, internal controls, forensic capability, whistleblowing, enforcement certainty, ethical culture, and data-driven detection are most effective when they operate as complementary layers. Technology improves detection speed and scale but does not substitute for professional judgment, implementation quality, institutional capacity, or accountability. Contradictory findings across board structure, sanctions, and audit effects further indicate strong contextual boundary conditions. The review therefore proposes an integrated configurational framework in which prevention, detection, and sanctioning are linked through governance quality and institutional context. This framework advances fraud research beyond isolated mechanisms and provides a focused agenda for longitudinal, cross-country, behavioral, and algorithmic-accountability research.]]>
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