Your Token Is Gone: A Token-Consumption Countermeasure for Disrupting LLM-Based Scam Systems

Abstract

LLM-based scam systems increasingly combine adaptive dialogue, persistent context, external tools, and multi-agent coordination to automate personalized fraud. These capabilities also create a resource dependency: every reasoning step, model call, and coordination round incurs inference cost. We present TokenTrap, a resource-oriented defense that redirects suspected scam systems toward benign, low-value computation while withholding credentials, payments, and other exploitable information. TokenTrap combines three components: an architecture-specific token-task library, a router that selects among single-agent, hierarchical, and flat multi-agent workflows, and a bounded anti-guardrail strategy that varies task presentation while enforcing token, round, time, and safety limits. Across 50-round traces, TokenTrap amplifies token consumption by $2,487.0\times$, $1,616.0\times$, and $567.8\times$ relative to a no-token-task baseline for the three workflows. Its router achieves 85.67% accuracy on 300 architecture-labeled prompts. These results demonstrate that short, non-sensitive requests can impose substantial context-processing and coordination costs, motivating resource-aware defense as a complement to scam detection.

arXiv comment10 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables