A Study of Targeted Telephone Scams Involving Live Attackers

We present the results of a research study in which participants were subjected to social engineering attacks via telephone, telephone scams, in order to determine the features of scams which people are most susceptible to. The study has involved 186 university participants who were attacked with one of 27 different attack scripts which span different independent variables including the pretext used and the method of elicitation. In order to ensure informed consent, each participant was warned that they would receive a scam phone call within 3 months. One independent variable used is the time between the warning and launching the scam. In spite of this warning, a large fraction of participants were still deceived by the scam. A limitation to research in the study of telephone scams is the lack of a dataset of real phone scams for examination. Each phone call in our study was recorded and we present the dataset of these recordings, and their transcripts. To our knowledge, there is no similar publicly-available dataset or phone scams. We hope that our dataset will support future research in phone scams and their detection.