Forensic Schema for Psychological Manipulation in Cyber Fraud: LLM-Driven Victim Reports Analysis

Abstract

Existing cybercrime classification schemas capture contact metadata and financial transactions but omit the psychological manipulation techniques perpetrators employ. We present a forensic schema (four categories, 35 questions) adding 11 manipulation indicators and cryptocurrency evidence fields to established forensic foundations. Applied to 10,994 victim reports via large language model (LLM)-driven annotation and validated against two human annotators (mean LLM-human $κ= 0.69$, matching inter-annotator $κ= 0.68$), the schema revealed a statistically distinct manipulation profile for each major fraud type (Cramer's $V$ up to $0.790$). A rationale-based evidence audit nonetheless exposed a forensic detail gap: detection of manipulation techniques was reliable, but victim narratives varied widely in the actionable detail supporting each Yes answer, and blockchain-specific identifiers were nearly absent. These findings point to AI-assisted victim intake with schema-informed follow-up questions as the most direct way to close the gap. The tiered annotation strategy also provides a reusable template for LLM-based extraction from other forensic text domains.