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 psychological trauma, largely due to scammers' strategic employment of
psychological techniques (PTs) to manipulate victims. Meanwhile, scammers
continually evolve their tactics by leveraging advances in Large Language
Models (LLMs) to generate diverse scam variants that easily bypass existing
defenses.
To address this pressing problem, we introduce PsyScam, a benchmark designed
to systematically capture the PTs employed in real-world scam reports, and
investigate how LLMs can be utilized to generate variants of scams based on the
PTs and the contexts provided by these scams. Specifically, we collect a wide
range of scam reports and ground its annotations of employed PTs in
well-established cognitive and psychological theories. We further demonstrate
LLMs' capabilities in generating through two downstream tasks: scam completion,
and scam augmentation. Experimental results show that PsyScam presents
significant challenges to existing models in both detecting and generating scam
content based on the PTs used by real-world scammers. Our code and dataset are
available.