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arXiv · 2610.26781

Game of Phones: Harnessing Game Theory and LLMs in 'Bot Wars' to Counteract Phone Scams

Nardine Basta·Robin Carpentier·Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao·Dali Kaafar
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Abstract

Phone scams impose substantial and growing costs on individuals and financial systems worldwide, yet existing countermeasures impose no resource cost on perpetrators. Strategic scam-baiting, in which automated agents engage scammers to deplete their operational capacity, offers a proactive alternative but requires dynamic strategy adaptation that static systems cannot provide. We introduce a game-theoretic framework enabling LLMs to learn effective counter-strategies through in-context experience without fine-tuning. The framework models scammer-baiter interactions as a two-player game with empirically grounded strategies and utility functions, using Nash equilibrium as a formal benchmark for evaluating learned behaviour. Across 300 simulated dialogues and three LLM architectures, adaptive strategy selection achieves 28.9-79.7% closer alignment to Nash equilibrium than non-adaptive baselines. The code and an annotated dataset of 300 dialogues with turn-level strategy labels and utility scores are released at https://github.com/nardinebasta/GameofPhones_/ .

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Nardine Basta, Robin Carpentier, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, Dali Kaafar. 2026-10-19. Game of Phones: Harnessing Game Theory and LLMs in 'Bot Wars' to Counteract Phone Scams. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-37682-4_23

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