Scam2Prompt: A Scalable Framework for Auditing Malicious Scam Endpoints in Production LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Zhiyang, Saba, Tara, Deng, Xun, Si, Xujie, Long, Fan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Zhiyang
Saba, Tara
Deng, Xun
Si, Xujie
Long, Fan
author_facet Chen, Zhiyang
Saba, Tara
Deng, Xun
Si, Xujie
Long, Fan
contents Large Language Models have become critical to modern software development, but their reliance on uncurated web-scale datasets for training introduces a significant security risk: the absorption and reproduction of malicious content. This risk materialized in November 2024, when a user suffered a 2,500 USD financial loss after executing code generated by ChatGPT that contained a live scam phishing URL. To systematically evaluate this risk, we introduce Scam2Prompt, a scalable automated auditing framework that identifies the underlying intent of a scam site and then synthesizes developer-style prompts that mirror this intent, allowing us to test whether an LLM will generate malicious code in response to these prompts. In a large-scale study of four production LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Llama-4-Scout, and DeepSeek-V3), we found that Scam2Prompt's developer-style prompts triggered malicious URL generation in 4.24\% of cases. To test the persistence of this security risk, we constructed Innoc2Scam-bench, a benchmark of 1,377 prompts that consistently elicited malicious code from all four initial LLMs. When applied to seven additional production LLMs released in 2025, we found the vulnerability is not only present but severe, with malicious code generation rates ranging from 12.9\% to 47.3\%. Furthermore, existing safety measures like state-of-the-art guardrails or RAG-based agents proved insufficient to prevent this behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02372
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scam2Prompt: A Scalable Framework for Auditing Malicious Scam Endpoints in Production LLMs
Chen, Zhiyang
Saba, Tara
Deng, Xun
Si, Xujie
Long, Fan
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
Large Language Models have become critical to modern software development, but their reliance on uncurated web-scale datasets for training introduces a significant security risk: the absorption and reproduction of malicious content. This risk materialized in November 2024, when a user suffered a 2,500 USD financial loss after executing code generated by ChatGPT that contained a live scam phishing URL. To systematically evaluate this risk, we introduce Scam2Prompt, a scalable automated auditing framework that identifies the underlying intent of a scam site and then synthesizes developer-style prompts that mirror this intent, allowing us to test whether an LLM will generate malicious code in response to these prompts. In a large-scale study of four production LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Llama-4-Scout, and DeepSeek-V3), we found that Scam2Prompt's developer-style prompts triggered malicious URL generation in 4.24\% of cases. To test the persistence of this security risk, we constructed Innoc2Scam-bench, a benchmark of 1,377 prompts that consistently elicited malicious code from all four initial LLMs. When applied to seven additional production LLMs released in 2025, we found the vulnerability is not only present but severe, with malicious code generation rates ranging from 12.9\% to 47.3\%. Furthermore, existing safety measures like state-of-the-art guardrails or RAG-based agents proved insufficient to prevent this behavior.
title Scam2Prompt: A Scalable Framework for Auditing Malicious Scam Endpoints in Production LLMs
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02372