ReDence is an open‑source hybrid framework that combines a multimodal agentic Investigator model with a specialized Decider model to detect modern social engineering scams. It automates investigative planning, evidence interpretation, and decision‑making across multiple scam categories, achieving 96% accuracy and operating at least four times faster than comparable agentic models. The system outputs structured, evidence‑grounded reports that enable analysts to audit decisions and support mitigation efforts.
By Jaishnoor Kaur, Josef Hor\'a\v{c}ek, Ian Waskom, Sayak Saha Roy
The paper introduces MechScam, a benchmark of 6,614 videos that covers diverse scam mechanisms and non‑scam content, providing evidence‑supported explanations and annotations of scam elements. It also proposes ScamCourt, a debate framework where prosecution and defense debaters argue over verified citations, and a judge decides based on the transcript. Experiments show that current large multimodal language models struggle to differentiate scam videos from similar non‑scam content, while ScamCourt reduces false positives and better resists misleading arguments.
By Yifan Wang, Junyu Lu, Shun Zhang, Chaozhuo Li, Fanliang Bu, Rong Yin, Lingbin Bu, Changrong Min, Peng Chen
arXiv:2607. 11707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Following the rapid progress of generative Artificial Intelligence, there is a growing threat posed by conversational scams.
By Ahmed Omar Salim Adnan, Yogananda Manjunath, Shivanjali Khare
arXiv:2602. 09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf.
By Georgios Syros, Evan Rose, Brian Grinstead, Christoph Kerschbaumer, William Robertson, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Alina Oprea
arXiv:2609.06027v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Search-augmented LLM agents are increasingly used for consumer decisions, making them vulnerable to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) poisoning. E...
By Zhongan Bi, Qiwen Wang, Jianrong Jiang, Jigang Ding, Wenwen Xiong, Changhua Meng, Xuanang Gao, Kepeng Lin, Changjiang Jiang, Yiang Chen, Huan Yao, Wei Wang, Zhenyu Ma, Wenhui Dong
arXiv:2512. 23128v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web-based agents powered by large language models are increasingly used for tasks such as email management or professional networking.
By Karolina Korgul, Yushi Yang, Arkadiusz Drohomirecki, Piotr B{\l}aszczyk, Will Howard, Lukas Aichberger, Chris Russell, Philip H. S. Torr, Adam Mahdi, Adel Bibi
arXiv:2606.00497v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Deceptive web content, widely instantiated across the internet and commonly known as \textit{social-engineering attacks}, manipulates autonom...
By Soham Roy, Sarthakbrata Halder, Arya Bharaty, Vaibhav Bhaskar, Yash Sinha, Dhruv Kumar, Srikant Panda, Murari Mandal
arXiv:2607. 10455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous CLI agents can now execute hundreds of actions across multi-hour sessions: writing code, executing shell commands, browsing the web, and managing cloud infrastructure, all with minimal human oversight.
By Kefan Song, Yanjun Qi
The paper introduces a dataset of 10,015 real scam and spam phone calls collected over 53 days using an active voice‑agent honeypot. Each call is recorded, transcribed, and automatically labeled, yielding 328,869 turn‑level transcripts and 895 hours of audio from 5,665 distinct numbers. The corpus distinguishes between predatory‑but‑legal lead generation and outright scams, with labels validated by human review and technical checks on realism.
By Ethan Traister, Dennis Tsang Ng, Siyu Zhang, Huaiyu Guo, Tommy Duong, Tyler Wu, Yuchen Zhou, Xingyu Shen, Jiaqi Wu, Simiao Ren
The paper introduces MisVisAgentBench, a paired benchmark with 280 task instances that compare clean versus misleading chart evidence for web agents. It evaluates how deceptive visualizations affect agent execution, providing a diagnostic framework to separate misleading-induced failures from baseline difficulty. Results show that misleading charts reduce task success by over 34 percentage points and tend to redirect agents toward targeted misleading actions.
By Yisheng Li, Dongming Han, Hongkun Pan, Bingcheng Mao, Zijian Wang, Yunlong Mao, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong
The study analyzes 10,211 real scam and spam calls collected by an AI voice‑agent honeypot, revealing that scammers operate on a templated, office‑hour schedule and use disposable numbers to recycle scripts. Callers predominantly seek identity anchors such as home addresses and dates of birth, and the amount of conversation increases with the target’s age, though the requested information remains unchanged. Early detection is feasible, with escalation predictability reaching 0.87 ROC‑AUC by the eighth line using simple bag‑of‑words models.
By Ethan Traister, Ankit Raj, Jiaqi Gan, Xingyu Shen, Tyler Wu, Yuchen Zhou, Tommy Duong, Kidus Zewde, Siying Chen, Simiao Ren
arXiv:2606. 13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences.
By Zihao Wang, Yiming Li, Yutong Wu, Zheyu Liu, Kangjie Chen, Fok Kar Wai, Pin-Yu Chen, Vrizlynn L. L. Thing, Bo Li, Dacheng Tao, Tianwei Zhang