SCRIPTMIND: Crime Script Inference and Cognitive Evaluation for LLM-based Social Engineering Scam Detection System

Heedou Kim, Changsik Kim, Sanghwa Shin, Jaewoo Kang


Abstract
Social engineering scams increasingly employ personalized, multi-turn deception, exposing the limits of traditional detection methods. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in identifying deception, their cognitive assistance potential remains underexplored. We propose ScriptMind, an integrated framework for LLM-based scam detection that bridges automated reasoning and human cognition. It comprises three components: the Crime Script Inference Task (CSIT) for scam reasoning, the Crime Script–Aware Inference Dataset (CSID) for fine-tuning small LLMs, and the Cognitive Simulation-based Evaluation of Social Engineering Defense (CSED) for assessing real-time cognitive impact. Using 571 Korean scam cases, we built 22,712 structured scammer-sequence training instances. Experimental results show that the 11B small LLM fine-tuned with ScriptMind outperformed GPT-4o by 13%, achieving superior performance over commercial models in detection accuracy, false-positive reduction, scammer utterance prediction, and rationale quality. Moreover, in phone scam simulation experiments, it significantly enhanced and sustained users’ suspicion levels, improving their cognitive awareness of scams. ScriptMind represents a step toward human-centered, cognitively adaptive LLMs for scam defense.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-industry.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Yevgen Matusevych, Gülşen Eryiğit, Nikolaos Aletras
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–38
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.2/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Heedou Kim, Changsik Kim, Sanghwa Shin, and Jaewoo Kang. 2026. SCRIPTMIND: Crime Script Inference and Cognitive Evaluation for LLM-based Social Engineering Scam Detection System. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 11–38, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SCRIPTMIND: Crime Script Inference and Cognitive Evaluation for LLM-based Social Engineering Scam Detection System (Kim et al., EACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.2.pdf