An Empirical Analysis of SMS Scam Detection Systems

Abstract: The short message service (SMS) was introduced a generation ago to the mobile phone users. They make up the world's oldest large-scale network, with billions of users and therefore attracts a lot of fraud. Due to the convergence of mobile network with internet, SMS based scams can potentially compromise the security of internet services as well. In this study, we present a new SMS scam dataset consisting of 153,551 SMSes. This dataset that we will release publicly for research purposes represents the largest publicly-available SMS scam dataset. We evaluate and compare the performance achieved by several established machine learning methods on the new dataset, ranging from shallow machine learning approaches to deep neural networks to syntactic and semantic feature models. We then study the existing models from an adversarial viewpoint by assessing its robustness against different level of adversarial manipulation. This perspective consolidates the current state of the art in SMS Spam filtering, highlights the limitations and the opportunities to improve the existing approaches.