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 (...
| Authors | Ethan Traister, Ankit Raj, Jiaqi Gan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 25 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 August 2026 |
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