Game of Phones: Harnessing Game Theory and LLMs in 'Bot Wars' to Counteract Phone Scams

Key points

• Phone scams impose substantial and growing costs on individuals and financial systems worldwide, yet existing countermeasures impose no resource cost on perpetrators.1
• Strategic scam-baiting, in which automated agents engage scammers to deplete their operational capacity, offers a proactive alternative but requires dynamic strategy adaptation that static systems cannot provide.1
• The framework models scammer-baiter interactions as a two-player game with empirically grounded strategies and utility functions, using Nash equilibrium as a formal benchmark for evaluating learned behaviour.1
• Across 300 simulated dialogues and three LLM architectures, adaptive strategy selection achieves 28.9-79.7% closer alignment to Nash equilibrium than non-adaptive baselines.1

Sources (1)

• [1]Game of Phones: Harnessing Game Theory and LLMs in 'Bot Wars' to Counteract Phone Scams
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 19, 05:35 PM

  We introduce a game-theoretic framework enabling LLMs to learn effective counter-strategies through in-context experience without fine-tuning.

  Phone scams impose substantial and growing costs on individuals and financial systems worldwide, yet existing countermeasures impose no resource cost on perpetrators.

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