Beyond Risk Cues: A Mechanism-Level Benchmark and Verifiable Debate for Scam Video Detection on the Web

Abstract

Online scam videos pose significant threats to individuals and society. Existing studies primarily focus on binary classification, offering limited insights into how scams work and the reasoning behind detection decisions. Moreover, they often overlook the challenge of distinguishing scam videos from superficially similar non-scam content, such as advertisements, and the robustness of detection models against misleading arguments. These limitations hinder reliable scam video detection. To address these limitations, we introduce MechScam, a benchmark comprising 6,614 videos covering diverse scam mechanisms and non-scam categories. MechScam provides explanations supported by video evidence, annotations of potential scam elements and their context, and misleading arguments constructed from genuine evidence. Recognizing that genuine evidence can still be used to justify misleading conclusions, we further propose ScamCourt, a debate framework in which trained prosecution and defense debaters present opposing arguments, while a trained judge makes decisions based on a transcript with verified citations. Extensive experiments show that state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle to distinguish scam videos from similar non-scam content. ScamCourt outperforms larger MLLMs and same-backbone fine-tuned baselines, reducing false positives and showing stronger resistance to misleading arguments. Together, MechScam and ScamCourt contribute to more reliable and interpretable scam video detection. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SuperYFan/MechScam.