Despite the number of immigrants in the U.S., limited research exists on their financial fraud experience. Delving deeper into immigrants’ financial fraud experience including the types of fraud is important because it can be a barrier for them to be fully integrated into the U.S. economy. The primary purpose of this study was to understand the fraud experience of immigrant consumers in the United States and to identify possible associations between individual factors and state-level factors and financial fraud experience and type of fraud experienced. Individual factors include financial literacy and cognitive abilities (from the data of Understanding America Study), and state-level factors include measures for proportion immigrant population (from the American Community Survey) and fraud severity (from Federal Trade Commission) in the state of residence. The study found that financial fraud experience was more widespread for first- and second-generation immigrants compared to non-immigrants, and misrepresentation of information was the most frequently experienced type of financial fraud. The results from SEM showed that the lower financial literacy among second-generation immigrants and the trend that immigrants tend to reside in the states with more foreign-born population and with higher fraud severity partially contributed to immigrants’ fraud experience.
