The Promise of Strategic Agentic Scambaiting

Abhishek Satyam; Hossein Siadati; Haadi Jafarian; Sima Jafarikhah; Juntao Chen

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2611.08170

The Promise of Strategic Agentic Scambaiting

Abhishek Satyam·Hossein Siadati·Haadi Jafarian·Sima Jafarikhah·Juntao Chen

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Scammers have increasingly adopted AI-driven capabilities, evolving from automated message generation to fully agentic conversational systems that scale operations and maximize the exploitation of fraudulent resources before detection and takedown. In parallel, agentic scambaiting has emerged as a defensive approach in which autonomous agents impersonate potential victims and engage scammers in sustained interactions to extract actionable threat intelligence, such as mule bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallet addresses, that can be reported to disrupt fraudulent infrastructures. Together, these developments transform online fraud into an adversarial socio-technical ecosystem in which autonomous scamming and scambaiting agents engage in deceptive interactions while competing over the discovery, preservation, and exploitation of one another's resources. A fundamental and largely unexplored question is how defensive scambaiting can remain effective in an agent-to-agent environment, and under what conditions either side gains a strategic advantage. In this paper, we present a formal model of agent-to-agent fraud interactions that captures the strategic decision spaces available to both attackers and defenders. Using this framework, we analyze the dynamics of engagement, resource consumption, belief adaptation, and disruption outcomes. We find that scammer profitability turns negative once baiting-agent prevalence exceeds certain thresholds, and that when both sides improve at the same pace, defender investment in mimicry quality outpaces equivalent gains in scammer detection capability, so the arms race favors the defender under our baseline parameters. Our model and findings provide insights into the stability, scalability, and long-term effectiveness of autonomous defensive agents in an evolving AI-mediated fraud landscape.

Explore related subjects

cs.CR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Abhishek Satyam, Hossein Siadati, Haadi Jafarian, Sima Jafarikhah, Juntao Chen. 2026-11-05. The Promise of Strategic Agentic Scambaiting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08170

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Backdoor Channels Hidden in Latent Space: Extending Cryptographic Undetectability to Modern Neural Networks

Recent cryptographic results establish that neural networks can be backdoored such that no efficient algorithm can distinguish them from a clean model. These guarantees, however, have been confined to stylised architectures of limited practical relevance, leaving open whether comparable undetectability extends to modern, end-to-end trained networks. We construct such an attack mechanism for deep neural network architectures, closely aligned to the cryptographic notion of undetectability, by identifying backdoor channels as learned latent directions, and show that the question of undetectability reduces to a hypothesis test between two unknown distributions over model parameters, which we conjecture to be intractable in practice. The consequence of this reframing is significant: if exploitable channels within a network's latent space are statistically indistinguishable from naturally learned directions, an attacker need not introduce foreign structure but can instead exploit the geometry the network already possesses. Demonstrating the approach on ResNet and Vision Transformer architectures trained on standard image classification datasets, the attack achieves both consistently high success rates with negligible clean accuracy degradation, and resists a comprehensive suite of post-training defences, none of which neutralise the backdoor without rendering the model unusable. Our results establish that cryptographic backdoors need not be artefacts requiring exotic architectures or artificial constructions, but identifiable as latent properties inherent to the geometry of learned representations.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Erase the Mark, Preserve the Motion: Temporally Consistent Removal of Video Watermarks

Recent advances in video generation have increased the demand for reliable watermarking for copyright protection, yet the robustness of video watermarks against removal attacks remains underexplored. Most watermark-removal methods originate from the image domain: signal optimization injects imperceptible pixel-domain perturbations, whereas generative resynthesis produces a visually similar instance through diffusion synthesis. When extended to videos, the former introduces temporally varying noise that causes visible flickering, while the latter regenerates fine-grained structures inconsistently across frames, leading to structural motion inconsistency. To evaluate video watermark robustness, we propose PoseRegen, a pose-consistent reconstruction framework that removes watermarks while preserving the original content and motion. PoseRegen first applies a temporally shared viewpoint transformation to disrupt watermark-bearing spatial patterns and then jointly reconstructs the transformed sequence with a pose-conditioned video model. A frozen video DiT processes the complete sequence with its reference-video latent, and full-sequence Flow Matching supervision keeps identity and background consistent across frames. To further preserve motion structure, we introduce a lightweight Pose-Conditioned Motion Consistency Adapter that adapts the frozen backbone to temporally ordered pose guidance and constrains body-part trajectories throughout reconstruction. Experiments on eleven video watermarking schemes show that PoseRegen reduces the average bit accuracy to 0.505, near random guessing, while outperforming the strongest baseline by 9.34% on motion-related VBench metrics. These results reveal a practical vulnerability of current video watermarks and highlight the need to evaluate robustness jointly with temporal and motion quality.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Differential privacy with adjustable preservation of multivariate relationships

This paper derives an exact attenuation formula for multivariate cross-moments under differential privacy achieved through randomized response. From a proposed alternative formulation of randomization matrices compliant with differential privacy guarantees we show that, under attribute-level randomization and where the randomization of the whole distribution is characterized by Kronecker products, any cross-moment of the anonymized dataset involving distinct attributes is equal to the original cross-moment multiplied by attenuation parameters, themselves determined by the part of the overall privacy budget allocated to each attribute. This characterization enables explicit and transparent controls of multivariate relationships preservations in differential privacy through privacy budget allocation. A simple numerical illustration demonstrates that identical total budgets can yield substantially different covariance-preservation profiles. The results also make the multiplicative loss of higher-order interactions explicit and thus can support mechanism design guided by analytical priorities.

cs.CR↗