Despite repeated measures, YouTube’s comment section has been a fertile ground for scammers. With the growth of the cryptocurrency market and obscurity around it, a new form of scam, namely “Collusion Scam” has emerged as a dominant force within YouTube’s comment space. Unlike typical scams and spams, collusion scams employ a cunning persuasion strategy, using the facade of genuine social interactions within comment threads to create an aura of trust and success to entrap innocent users. In this research, we collect 1,174 such collusion scam threads and perform a detailed analysis, which is tailored towards the successful detection of these scams. We find that utilization of the collusion dynamics can provide an accuracy of 96.67% and an F1-score of 93.04%. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robust predictive power of metadata associated with these threads and user channels, which act as compelling indicators of collusion scams. Finally, we show that modern LLM, like chatGPT, can effectively detect collusion scams without the need for any training.

Deceptive text poses a significant threat to users, resulting in widespread misinformation and disorder. While researchers have created numerous cutting-edge techniques for detecting deception in domain-specific settings, whether there is a generic deception pattern so that deception-related knowledge in one domain can be transferred to the other remains mostly unexplored. Moreover, the disparities in textual expression across these many mediums pose an additional obstacle for generalization. To this end, we present a Multi-Task Learning (MTL)-based deception generalization strategy to reduce the domain-specific noise and facilitate a better understanding of deception via a generalized training. As deceptive domains, we use News (fake news), Tweets (rumors), and Reviews (fake reviews) and employ LSTM and BERT model to incorporate domain transfer techniques. Our proposed architecture for the combined approach of domain-independent and domain-specific training improves the deception detection performance by up to 5.28% in F1-score.

Subjectivity and difference of opinion are key social phenomena, and it is crucial to take these into account in the annotation and detection process of derogatory textual content. In this paper, we use four datasets provided by SemEval-2023 Task 11 and fine-tune a BERT model to capture the disagreement in the annotation. We find individual annotator modeling and aggregation lowers the Cross-Entropy score by an average of 0.21, compared to the direct training on the soft labels. Our findings further demonstrate that annotator metadata contributes to the average 0.029 reduction in the Cross-Entropy score.

The deception in the text can be of different forms in different domains, including fake news, rumor tweets, and spam emails. Irrespective of the domain, the main intent of the deceptive text is to deceit the reader. Although domain-specific deception detection exists, domain-independent deception detection can provide a holistic picture, which can be crucial to understand how deception occurs in the text. In this paper, we detect deception in a domain-independent setting using deep learning architectures. Our method outperforms the State-of-the-Art performance of most benchmark datasets with an overall accuracy of 93.42% and F1-Score of 93.22%. The domain-independent training allows us to capture subtler nuances of deceptive writing style. Furthermore, we analyze how much in-domain data may be helpful to accurately detect deception, especially for the cases where data may not be readily available to train. Our results and analysis indicate that there may be a universal pattern of deception lying in-between the text independent of the domain, which can create a novel area of research and open up new avenues in the field of deception detection.