Vishing-Tactics-Bench: Forecasting Exploitation Trajectories in Voice Phishing Calls

Jeongmin Lee, DongMyung Sul, Seung Yun, Jin-Xia Huang


Abstract
Voice phishing (vishing) unfolds in real time; by the time a call has ended and post-hoc classification is possible, the harm has already been done. The more actionable question is which concrete harm (Information Gathering or Financial Exploitation) an ongoing call is tactically progressing toward. We present Vishing-Tactics-Bench, a benchmark grounded in Endsley’s situation-awareness (SA) framework that recasts vishing defense from after-the-fact fraud classification to harm projection: predicting at each turn whether the call will reach either terminal harm. We adapt MITRE ATT CK to vishing as a 6-tactic taxonomy (Vishing-Tactics) and label 35,340 scammer utterances across 5,645 synthetic Chinese calls. We define Exploitation Trajectory Forecasting, a survival-style protocol over the two terminal harms with three metrics: AP@k, C-index, and divergence error. Baselines ranging from a Markov heuristic to fine-tuned LLMs show that the tactical trajectory serves as an interpretable representation of the call’s tactical state, supporting harm-specific forecasting, which can then be used for the downstream application of intervention selection; a stratified lead-time analysis at a tight false-alarm budget further identifies at what point in a call the trajectory signal yields early warning.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2347
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
50458–50473
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2347/
DOI:
10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.2347
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jeongmin Lee, DongMyung Sul, Seung Yun, and Jin-Xia Huang. 2026. Vishing-Tactics-Bench: Forecasting Exploitation Trajectories in Voice Phishing Calls. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 50458–50473, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Vishing-Tactics-Bench: Forecasting Exploitation Trajectories in Voice Phishing Calls (Lee et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2347.pdf