Early Risk Prediction in Real Calls

arXiv · 2026

Predicting requests for sensitive information from a call's first lines.

Problem

Can the opening lines of a real inbound call predict that the caller will later ask for sensitive information?

My contribution

  • Analyzed 10,211 real inbound calls and 330,956 transcribed turns to predict later sensitive-information requests.

Results

  • 0.87 ROC-AUC of a bag-of-words baseline from the first 8 caller lines, on 1,276 calls held out by phone number

Paper

2026 Preprint

Anatomy of a Scam Call: What 10,000 real scam and spam calls reveal about how phone scammers operate

Ethan Traister, Ankit Raj*, Jiaqi Gan*, Xingyu Shen*, Tyler Wu*, Yuchen Zhou*, Tommy Duong*, Kidus Zewde*, Siying Chen*, Simiao Ren†

arXiv:2608.24127 (2026)

* Equal contribution; listed in no particular order. † Corresponding author.