Forensic Schema for Psychological Manipulation in Cyber Fraud: LLM-Driven Victim Reports Analysis

arXiv:2607.07751 · cs.CR · Submitted 2026-07-08 · Read on arXiv

Zikai Alex Wen, Corrazon Ogot, Juan Li, Yan Bai

cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-07-08

Comments: Accepted by the 23rd International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST 2026)

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Existing cybercrime classification schemas capture contact metadata and financial transactions but omit the psychological manipulation techniques perpetrators employ.

Terminology

Abstract

Existing cybercrime classification schemas capture contact metadata and financial transactions but omit the psychological manipulation techniques perpetrators employ. We present a forensic schema (four categories, 35 questions) adding 11 manipulation indicators and cryptocurrency evidence fields to established forensic foundations. Applied to 10,994 victim reports via large language model (LLM)-driven annotation and validated against two human annotators (mean LLM-human kappa = 0.69, matching inter-annotator kappa = 0.68), the schema revealed a statistically distinct manipulation profile for each major fraud type (Cramer's V up to 0.790). A rationale-based evidence audit nonetheless exposed a forensic detail gap: detection of manipulation techniques was reliable, but victim narratives varied widely in the actionable detail supporting each Yes answer, and blockchain-specific identifiers were nearly absent. These findings point to AI-assisted victim intake with schema-informed follow-up questions as the most direct way to close the gap. The tiered annotation strategy also provides a reusable template for LLM-based extraction from other forensic text domains.

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