Anatomy of a Scam Call: What 10,000 real scam and spam calls reveal about how phone scammers operate

Telephone fraud is pervasive and costly, but its inner workings are rarely observed at scale. We analyze a complete corpus of 10,211 inbound scam and spam calls -- 913 hours of audio and 330,956 transcribed turns from 5,780 distinct numbers -- collected over 54 days by an AI voice-agent honeypot that answered callers and kept them talking, and introduced in a companion data descriptor. We separate outright scams, which solicit sensitive information, from the larger stream of predatory but legal lead generation ("spam") that feeds them. Scam operations keep office hours (6.6x more calls per weekday than weekend day); thousands of disposable numbers run a small catalog of recycled scripts (thirty opening clusters, half the traffic in the top five); and callers solicit identity anchors -- a home address and a date of birth -- far more often than payment credentials, pressing through persistence and manufactured authority rather than overt threats. Our central experiment asks: does it matter who picks up? Every seeded lead carried one of ten fictitious identities drawn uniformly at random, so the identity a fraud operation reaches is fixed before the caller exists. Across 1,823 randomized calls, scammers spent about 15% more conversational turns per decade of the target's apparent age (rate ratio 1.15, 95% CI 1.08-1.23; randomization p = 0.005) -- yet what they asked for did not change (26.3% of calls reached a request for sensitive information; odds ratio 0.99 per decade, 95% CI 0.90-1.08). A second experiment casts early detection as a benchmark: from a scammer's opening lines alone, on a caller-disjoint split, escalation is predictable at 0.72 ROC-AUC from the first line and 0.87 by the eighth, and a plain bag-of-words classifier matches a fine-tuned on-device language model. Telephone fraud emerges as a templated industry that varies how hard it works a target, but not what it wants.

Chameleon: An Adaptive AI-Driven Honeypot Architecture Using Threat-Calibrated Particle Swarm Optimization and Semantic Deception Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees

An invariant behavioral profile is the defining vulnerability of traditional honeypot installations: a skilled adversary can confirm the presence of a deception environment within only a few diagnostic commands, limiting its intelligence value. High-cost commercial deception products (USD 100,000--150,000 per year) share a related weakness in that their response engines are not coupled to real-time model-driven feedback. Chameleon is an openly distributed adaptive honeypot platform introduced here to address both shortcomings. Three core components are integrated: a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) classifier achieving 99.61% accuracy across seven threat categories at approximately two milliseconds CPU latency; a locally deployed Qwen3.5-0.8B language model (Qwen Team, 2026; Unsloth, 2026) delivering 90% contextual generation accuracy at 4.5 milliseconds average latency; and two domain-specific meta-heuristic engines. Threat-Calibrated Particle Swarm Optimization (TC-PSO) dynamically reshapes swarm inertia and objective amplification in proportion to the classifier's anomaly output, enabling real-time adjustment of connection-holding delays. Semantic Deception Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (S-RRT) drives deception schema evolution via exponentially scaled pheromone updates derived from a language-model severity assessment, while a depth-decay multiplier enforces a finite memory footprint. Across five benchmark runs (seeds 42--46), TC-PSO outperformed standard PSO by 48.1% in mean fitness (2.60 to 3.85) with a 32.7% convergence gain, and S-RRT exceeded standard RRT by 258.9% in best-run fitness (450.2 to 1,615.8), achieving a 329.2% gain at critical severity and a 24.9% memory reduction (p < 0.01). Operating costs are approximately USD 17 per month, a roughly 490-fold reduction versus commercial alternatives.