Related papers: Victim as a Service: Designing a System for Engagi…
Longer-running scams, such as romance fraud and "pig-butchering" scams, exploit not only victims' emotions but also the design of digital platforms. Scammers commonly leverage features such as professional-looking profile verification,…
Pig-butchering scams have emerged as a complex form of fraud that combines elements of romance, investment fraud, and advanced social engineering tactics to systematically exploit victims. In this paper, we present the first qualitative…
In the recent past, so-called pig-butchering scams are on the rise. This term is based on a translation of the Chinese term "Sha Zhu Pan", where scammers refer to victims as "pig" which are to be "fattened up before slaughter" so that…
Chat-based cybercrime has emerged as a pervasive threat, with attackers leveraging real-time messaging platforms to conduct scams that rely on trust-building, deception, and psychological manipulation. Traditional defense mechanisms, which…
Scammers are increasingly harnessing generative AI(GenAI) technologies to produce convincing phishing content at scale, amplifying financial fraud and undermining public trust. While conventional defenses, such as detection algorithms, user…
Romance-baiting scams have become a major source of financial and emotional harm worldwide. These operations are run by organized crime syndicates that traffic thousands of people into forced labor, requiring them to build emotional…
Automatic scam-baiting is an online fraud countermeasure that involves automated systems responding to online fraudsters in order to waste their time and deplete their resources, diverting attackers away from real potential victims.…
Fraud continues to proliferate online, from phishing and ransomware to impersonation scams. Yet automated prevention approaches adapt slowly and may not reliably protect users from falling prey to new scams. To better combat online scams,…
As a major component of online crime, email-based fraud is a threat that causes substantial economic losses every year. To counteract these scammers, volunteers called scam-baiters play the roles of victims, reply to scammers, and try to…
Generative AI, including large language models (LLMs) have the potential -- and already are being used -- to increase the speed, scale, and types of unsafe conversations online. LLMs lower the barrier for entry for bad actors to create…
Over the years, online scams have grown dramatically, with nearly 50% of global consumers encountering scam attempts each week. These scams cause not only significant financial losses to individuals and businesses, but also lasting…
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support cybersecurity operations is now a consolidated practice, e.g., to detect malicious code or configure traffic filtering policies. The recent surge of AI, generative techniques and frameworks…
We present "Bot Wars," a framework using Large Language Models (LLMs) scam-baiters to counter phone scams through simulated adversarial dialogues. Our key contribution is a formal foundation for strategy emergence through chain-of-thought…
Phone scams remain a difficult problem to tackle due to the combination of protocol limitations, legal enforcement challenges and advances in technology enabling attackers to hide their identities and reduce costs. Scammers use social…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained prominence in various applications, including security. This paper explores the utility of LLMs in scam detection, a critical aspect of cybersecurity. Unlike traditional applications, we propose a…
Phone scams pose a significant threat to individuals and communities, causing substantial financial losses and emotional distress. Despite ongoing efforts to combat these scams, scammers continue to adapt and refine their tactics, making it…
Phishing, a prevalent cybercrime tactic for decades, remains a significant threat in today's digital world. By leveraging clever social engineering elements and modern technology, cybercrime targets many individuals, businesses, and…
The recent advent of large language models (LLM) has resulted in high-performing conversational agents such as chatGPT. These agents must remember key information from an ongoing conversation to provide responses that are contextually…
Cybersecurity analysts work on large communication data sets to perform investigative analysis by painstakingly going over thousands of email conversations to find potential scamming activities and the network of cyber scammers.…
The advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them invaluable across various applications, from conversational agents and content creation to data analysis, research, and innovation. However, their effectiveness and…