flowxai/scam-guard-qwen17b

scam-guard 1.7B (working name) — the quality pick

An on-device scam & fraud message detector for SMS, email, and chat text (English + Romanian).

This is the 1.7B model — the more robust choice out-of-distribution and the quality ceiling of the two scam-guard sizes (~1.1 GB at int4). For the smallest, fastest footprint on a phone, see the sibling 0.6B on-device pick.

Given one message, scam-guard returns a 3-level verdict, the manipulation tactics it found (each with a verbatim evidence span quoted from the message), a calm plain-language explanation, and a recommended safe action from a fixed list. It is built for everyday people — explicitly including elderly and non-technical users, who are the most targeted.

The product insight that shapes everything: the suspicious middle level exists to be honest about uncertainty rather than force a binary. A consumer safety tool that must answer "scam or not" will either cry wolf or wave real scams through; a third honest verdict — "this might be fine, verify through your own channel first" — lets the model say I'm not sure instead of guessing. Relatedly, scam-guard never emits a probability: an uncalibrated confidence number on a consumer safety tool is worse than none, so we give you honest per-class behaviour instead (see Calibration).

• flowxai/scam-guard-qwen17b (this card, 1.7B) — the more robust choice out-of-distribution.
• flowxai/scam-guard-qwen06b (0.6B, sibling) — smallest and fastest; the on-device target (see Size decision).

Both are LoRA-fine-tuned from Apache-2.0 Qwen3 base models. On-device formats: GGUF (llama.cpp, int8 Q8_0 + int4 Q4_K_M) and MLX-quantized (int4 + int8; mlx-swift runs these on iOS too).

---

How do I use it?

Three copy-pasteable ways to turn a message into a verdict. All run fully on-device — no network at inference, ever.

Real example input (a fresh Romanian courier-fee smishing message):

Coletul dumneavoastra nu a putut fi livrat. Pentru reprogramare achitati taxa
vamala de 3,20 lei aici: http://colet-reprogramare.example.net/plata Livrarea se
anuleaza in 48h.

(a) llama.cpp / GGUF

Download a GGUF (int8 Q8_0 recommended) and run the message through it. The model emits a single strict JSON object.

llama-cli (CPU-only, -ngl 0):

llama-cli -m scam-guard-qwen17b-Q8_0.gguf -ngl 0 --temp 0 -no-cnv \
  -p "$(cat <<'EOF'
<system prompt: see src/scamguard/schema.py::SYSTEM_PROMPT>
[channel: sms]
Coletul dumneavoastra nu a putut fi livrat. Pentru reprogramare achitati taxa vamala de 3,20 lei aici: http://colet-reprogramare.example.net/plata Livrarea se anuleaza in 48h.
EOF
)"

llama-cpp-python:

from llama_cpp import Llama
from scamguard.schema import SYSTEM_PROMPT, ScamGuardOutput  # the fixed task prompt + schema

llm = Llama(model_path="scam-guard-qwen17b-Q8_0.gguf", n_gpu_layers=0)
msg = ("Coletul dumneavoastra nu a putut fi livrat. Pentru reprogramare achitati "
       "taxa vamala de 3,20 lei aici: http://colet-reprogramare.example.net/plata "
       "Livrarea se anuleaza in 48h.")

out = llm.create_chat_completion(
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": SYSTEM_PROMPT},
        {"role": "user", "content": f"[channel: sms]\n{msg}"},
    ],
    temperature=0.0,
)
raw = out["choices"][0]["message"]["content"]
verdict = ScamGuardOutput.model_validate_json(raw)   # strict, extra="forbid"

(b) MLX (Apple Silicon)

Off the MLX-quantized weights (int4/int8):

mlx_lm.generate --model scam-guard-qwen17b-mlx-int4 --temp 0 \
  --prompt "$(printf '[channel: sms]\nColetul dumneavoastra nu a putut fi livrat. Pentru reprogramare achitati taxa vamala de 3,20 lei aici: http://colet-reprogramare.example.net/plata Livrarea se anuleaza in 48h.')"

from mlx_lm import load, generate
from scamguard.schema import SYSTEM_PROMPT

model, tok = load("scam-guard-qwen17b-mlx-int4")
msg = ("Coletul dumneavoastra nu a putut fi livrat. Pentru reprogramare achitati "
       "taxa vamala de 3,20 lei aici: http://colet-reprogramare.example.net/plata "
       "Livrarea se anuleaza in 48h.")
prompt = tok.apply_chat_template(
    [{"role": "system", "content": SYSTEM_PROMPT},
     {"role": "user", "content": f"[channel: sms]\n{msg}"}],
    add_generation_prompt=True, enable_thinking=False,
)
raw = generate(model, tok, prompt=prompt, max_tokens=256, verbose=False)

Either backend returns the same strict JSON for this message:

{
  "verdict": "scam_likely",
  "tactics": [
    {
      "tactic": "subscription_trap",
      "evidence": "achitati taxa vamala de 3,20 lei",
      "explanation": "It asks you to pay a small fee to release a parcel."
    },
    {
      "tactic": "urgency_pressure",
      "evidence": "se anuleaza in 48h",
      "explanation": "It invents a 48-hour deadline to rush you."
    }
  ],
  "explanation": "This looks like a scam because it uses a fake fee to prompt a payment and pressures you with an artificial deadline; do not act on it, and check with the real organisation through a channel you already trust.",
  "recommended_action": "verify_via_official_app_or_site"
}

(c) The demo verdict card (demo/check.py)

The reference demo renders that JSON as a card a family member can read. It hard-enforces the no-network privacy promise. Select the 1.7B with --size 1.7b:

echo "Coletul dumneavoastra nu a putut fi livrat. Pentru reprogramare achitati taxa vamala de 3,20 lei aici: http://colet-reprogramare.example.net/plata Livrarea se anuleaza in 48h." | python demo/check.py --size 1.7b

Rendered output (the actual card, from reports/ood_fresh_demo.md):

====================================================================
  scam-guard  —  message safety check
====================================================================
  [!]  VERDICT:  Likely a scam

  This message shows clear signs of a scam. You do not need to do
  anything it asks. Take your time — real organisations are fine
  with you checking first.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
  What we noticed:
    - Sending a fake renewal or invoice to make you call or click
        seen in: "achitati taxa vamala de 3,20 lei"
    - Rushing you with a deadline or threat
        seen in: "se anuleaza in 48h"
--------------------------------------------------------------------
  What to do:
    Check directly using the company's official app or website
    that you open yourself — not the link here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
  In plain words:
  This looks like a scam because it uses a fake renewal invoice to
  prompt a call and it pressures you with an artificial deadline;
  do not act on it, and check with the real organisation through a
  channel you already trust.
====================================================================
  scam-guard is a helper, not a guarantee. When in doubt, verify
  through a channel you already trust. It never opens links.
====================================================================

demo/check.py defaults to the 0.6B; pass --size 1.7b for this model. --backend gguf and --model <path> switch weights/backend; --channel {sms,email,chat} sets the channel tag.

---

How it works

flowchart LR
  SMS  --> SG["scam-guard 1.7B"]
  Email --> SG
  Chat --> SG
  SG --> V[verdict]
  SG --> T[tactics]
  SG --> E[evidence]
  SG --> X[explanation]
  SG --> A[action]

Compact ASCII flow — three channels in, one local model, five fields out:

SMS
    \
Email ---> scam-guard 1.7B
Chat      /
              |
              + verdict
              + tactics
              + evidence
              + explanation
              + action

Under the hood, scam-guard is: tokenizer → Qwen3-1.7B (LoRA fine-tuned) → constrained JSON decode → evidence verifier (verbatim-substring kill-switch: drops fabricated spans).

The evidence kill-switch is the safety-critical stage. Every tactic must cite a span that is a verbatim substring of the input message (whitespace-normalized only — no case/diacritic folding). A tactic whose evidence is not found verbatim is dropped and counted as fabricated, so the model can never hallucinate a quote to justify a warning.

---

Output schema

A single strict JSON object (extra="forbid", frozen — a spurious field like confidence is rejected):

• verdict — scam_likely | suspicious | no_indicators (never a probability).
  • scam_likely — a clear scam mechanism is present and driven by tactics.
  • suspicious — the honest middle: signals present but plausibly legitimate, or only weak indicators (urgency alone, a link alone, an authority claim with no ask). "Verify through your own channel first."
  • no_indicators — no scam mechanism; legitimate messages can be urgent and contain links.
• tactics[] — each {tactic, evidence, explanation}, where tactic is one of 13 fixed ids and evidence is a verbatim substring (see the kill-switch above).
• explanation — one or two calm, actionable sentences.
• recommended_action — one id from a fixed list of 10 safe actions; the model can never compose free-text advice that points back at the scammer's own channel.

The 13 tactics: urgency_pressure, authority_impersonation, payment_redirect, credential_phishing, courier_customs_fee, prize_lottery, investment_too_good, romance_advance_fee, family_emergency_impersonation, tech_support, link_obfuscation, refund_overpayment, subscription_trap.

The 10 safe actions: call_bank_official_number, do_not_click_link, verify_via_official_app_or_site, call_family_member_known_number, do_not_share_codes_or_credentials, do_not_send_money, ignore_and_delete, report_to_authorities, check_sender_address, no_action_needed.

---

On-device privacy promise

scam-guard makes no network calls at inference, ever. It reasons over the message text only, fully locally. URL handling is lexical only — it inspects the visible URL string (lookalike domains, userinfo tricks, shorteners, punycode hints) and never fetches anything. This is the whole point: it works on messages people would never upload to a cloud service. The reference demo (demo/check.py) hard-enforces this with a no-network guard. At ~1.1 GB (int4), the 1.7B is larger than the 0.6B on-device pick but still runs fully locally on modern hardware.

---

Evaluation (1.7B)

Two evaluations, in order of what they tell you:

1. Out-of-distribution (OOD) fresh messages — the honest real-world signal.
2. ScamGuardBench v0.2 synthetic bench — a large in-distribution slice the model has a home-field advantage on (read the caveat).
3. Calibration — class-level behaviour, since there is no probability to calibrate.

All fine-tuned numbers below are the FINAL CUDA 3-epoch run (qwen17b_cuda), which supersedes the MLX first pass.

Out-of-distribution results (fresh CERT-pattern messages)

20 fresh messages — 10 realistic scam patterns modeled on current CERT/DNSC-style alerts (RO+EN) and 10 genuinely legit messages — hand-authored from public alert-pattern descriptions, NOT run through the synthetic generator the model trained on, sanitized, and asserted text-disjoint from training + every ScamGuardBench version (tests/test_ood_fresh.py). This is the honest generalization test. Full write-up: reports/ood_fresh_demo.md.

Model	Correct / 20	Dangerous MISSES (scam→no_indicators)	FALSE ALARMS (legit→scam_likely)	verdict macro-F1
flowxai/scam-guard-qwen17b (1.7B, quality)	19/20 (95%)	1	0	0.967
claude-haiku-4-5 (OOD reference)	19/20 (95%)	0	0	0.649
flowxai/scam-guard-qwen06b (0.6B, sibling)	18/20 (90%)	1	0	0.614

Bench → OOD gap (the home-field advantage, quantified): the 1.7B holds out-of-distribution — macro-F1 0.975 → 0.967 (−0.008), essentially no drop from its synthetic-bench headline. On fresh CERT-pattern messages the extra capacity + full 3-epoch budget pays off. Legit-FP stays 0.000.

Honest reading:

• The one dangerous MISS: the RO WhatsApp family-emergency scam "Mama, am pierdut telefonul … poti sa imi trimiti 850 lei", waved through as no_indicators. This persists at 1.7B + 3 epochs — throwing more size and compute at it did NOT fix it — which confirms it is a training-data gap, not a size/compute gap (too few family-emergency-without-explicit-money-keyword examples). The frontier reference (haiku) catches it. It is the honest limitation to fix (a data addition, planned before v1).
• Zero false alarms — no legit message was flagged scam_likely. The "disable-in-a-week" failure mode did not appear on fresh legit traffic.
• The 1.7B generalizes cleanly — 19/20, OOD macro-F1 0.967, no macro-F1 drop. On the in-distribution bench the two sizes both scored ~0.9+; on fresh messages the extra capacity shows, which is what makes this the robust choice.
• Format robustness held: JSON validity 1.000 and evidence pass 1.000 on fresh text (no repair/fallback needed).

RO vs EN, OOD (plain per-language accuracy over the 20-item OOD set — 9 RO / 11 EN; a per-language F1 is not computed in the reports):

Model	RO correct	EN correct
flowxai/scam-guard-qwen17b	8 / 9	11 / 11

RO is the first-class target language: the single RO miss is the family-emergency scam. On the in-distribution bench the RO-dominant tactics score at ceiling (family_emergency_impersonation F1 1.000, courier_customs_fee 1.000, refund_overpayment 1.000), which is exactly why the OOD RO family-emergency miss is the honest gap to close.

ScamGuardBench v0.2 (synthetic, in-distribution) — with the home-field caveat

Honesty caveat — home-field advantage (read before citing these numbers). The fine-tuned numbers beat the frontier reference on this benchmark, and that does NOT mean the model is a better real-world scam detector. ScamGuardBench v0.2 is built from the same synthetic generator the model trained on (held-out split, contamination-verified — no leakage of specific messages, but the same distribution: same output format, phrasing, tactic-to-message style). The fine-tune learned exactly that style. The frontier reference is the honest upper reference for a cold-prompted generalist — a better OOD proxy than the fine-tuned column — and the OOD results above are the real-world signal these bench numbers flatter.

Seeded 120-message slice (18 suspicious, 39 legit-confusable). A false positive is a scam_likely verdict on a legitimate message; suspicious is reported but not counted as an FP. FP-rate on the legit-confusable subset is the release gate.

Metric	qwen17b (CUDA)	claude-haiku-4-5 (frontier ref)	keyword (lower ref)
JSON validity (deployed decoder)	1.000	1.000	1.000
raw JSON validity (no repair)	1.000	n/a	n/a
verdict micro-F1	0.983	0.900	0.483
verdict macro-F1	0.975	0.829	0.482
tactic macro-F1	0.950	0.770	0.319
evidence pass rate	0.974	0.969	1.000
legit-confusable FP-rate	0.000	0.051	0.026

The reference claude-haiku-4-5 fails the FP gate (legit-confusable FP 0.051, 2/39 — it over-flags genuine family money requests), while the fine-tune holds 0.000. That is the home-field-advantage signal, not a claim of superior real-world judgment. family_money_request (a genuine "send me money" from family) is the hardest legit class — every frontier model over-flags it — while this fine-tune holds 0.000.

Full-budget note (MLX → CUDA). The shipped 1.7B is the CUDA 3-epoch run. It supersedes the earlier MLX ~1-epoch first pass (macro-F1 0.921 → 0.975, micro 0.950 → 0.983), while holding legit-FP at 0.000. The full budget bought +5.4 macro-F1 points in-distribution — the largest lift being suspicious recall (MLX 0.833 → CUDA 0.944, 17/18).

Calibration — we don't give you a probability

scam-guard deliberately emits no confidence percentage. An uncalibrated number on a consumer safety tool is worse than none: it invites false precision on a judgement that is genuinely uncertain. Instead of a probability to calibrate, we give you honest per-class behaviour so you know where the model is weak and where it is safe.

Confusion matrix (qwen17b CUDA, ScamGuardBench v0.2, 120-item slice; rows = gold, cols = predicted):

gold \ pred	scam_likely	suspicious	no_indicators	recall
scam_likely	62	1	0	0.984 (n=63)
suspicious	0	17	1	0.944 (n=18)
no_indicators	0	0	39	1.000 (n=39)

Per-class precision / recall / F1 (reports/eval_frontier.md) — micro-F1 0.983, macro-F1 0.975:

Verdict	Precision	Recall	F1	Support
scam_likely	1.000	0.984	0.992	63
suspicious	0.944	0.944	0.944	18
no_indicators	0.975	1.000	0.987	39

Where the model is weak, and where it is safe. The weakest class is still suspicious (recall 0.944, 17/18) — the honest middle is the hardest to catch — but the 1.7B lifts it well above the 0.6B (0.722). Crucially, every suspicious miss bleeds into no_indicators (the safe direction), never into scam_likely, and no legit item is ever flipped to scam_likely — which is why the legit-confusable FP-rate is 0.000. The model under-warns on ambiguous messages rather than over-warning on real ones; for a consumer guard that is the failure mode you want.

Size decision

• This model (flowxai/scam-guard-qwen17b, 1.7B) — the more robust choice. The OOD results are the reason: on fresh messages the extra capacity generalizes materially better (19/20, macro-F1 0.967, essentially no drop), a gap the in-distribution bench (both ~0.9+) did not surface. Passes all three release gates (JSON >99%, evidence >95%, legit-FP <3%). Choose it where quality — especially the honest middle class — is worth the ~1.1 GB (int4) footprint.
• The sibling flowxai/scam-guard-qwen06b (0.6B) — smallest and fastest. A genuinely defensible on-device ship at ~0.4 GB (int4) that also passes all three gates, but drops hardest out-of-distribution (macro-F1 −0.31, 18/20). Where size/latency matters more than robustness, ship the 0.6B.
• The gap is ~4.9 macro-F1 points, concentrated in suspicious recall (0.944 vs 0.722); both sizes solve the two common classes and both hold legit-FP at 0.000, and both share the RO family-emergency recall gap (the one dangerous OOD miss). That shared recall gap is the honest thing to fix before any release claim.

---

Formats & on-device latency (1.7B)

We targeted 150 ms. We measured ~1.7 s (best path). This target is currently not met. scam-guard emits a full multi-field JSON card (~138 tokens), not a single label, so decode dominates latency. The 1.7B is slower on every path than the 0.6B.

The headline configs for the 1.7B on the representative 300-char SMS (median, M3 Max):

Config	median	meets 150 ms?
MLX int4, Apple-Silicon GPU (Metal)	~1.7 s	no
GGUF int8 (Q8_0), CPU-only (-ngl 0)	~5.6 s	no

int4 GGUF (Q4_K_M) is a poor trade on these small models — on CPU it is slower than int8 and degrades quality (a spot-check sample became invalid JSON) — so Q8_0 is the recommended GGUF quant, and MLX int4 is the fastest quality-holding path.

Full per-quant numbers (1.7B)

GGUF (llama.cpp), CPU-only (-ngl 0), M3 Max — full JSON card, median over N=12 (reports/benchmark_gguf.json):

quant	file size	median	JSON spot-check
int8 (Q8_0)	1834 MB	5648 ms	4/4 valid
int4 (Q4_K_M)	1107 MB	9394 ms	3/4 (degraded)

MLX-quantized, Apple-Silicon GPU (Metal), M3 Max (reports/benchmark_mlx_quant.json):

quant	weights size	median	JSON spot-check
int4	968 MB	1677 ms	4/4 valid
int8	1828 MB	2176 ms	4/4 valid

bf16 MLX-Metal latency/memory and per-input-length detail are in reports/benchmark.md. Core ML (.mlpackage) was attempted; the LLM→Core ML conversion is finicky (stateful KV-cache handling) and the attempt is documented in PROGRESS.md rather than shipped as a fabricated artifact. GGUF and MLX are the recommended on-device paths today.

A human decision is needed at the release STOP: accept the ~1.7–5.6 s latency, ship the ~1.7 s GPU/MLX path, or shrink the output contract to approach 150 ms.

---

Intended use & limitations

Intended use. A consumer triage aid that explains why a message looks risky and points you to your own trusted channel to verify. Runs on-device. Languages: EN and RO at v1 (Romanian is a first-class citizen, not an afterthought); PL/HU planned fast-follow through the same pipeline.

Out of scope & limitations.

• Not a guarantee. A verdict is a signal, not proof. Scammers adapt continuously; the benchmark is versioned because patterns rotate.
• Verdicts can be wrong in both directions — a real scam may score no_indicators (the OOD RO family-emergency miss is a documented example), and a legitimate message may score suspicious. The suspicious middle level exists to be honest about uncertainty rather than force a binary.
• Known recall gap: the RO family-emergency pattern (framing without an explicit money-transfer keyword) can slip past this model — it persists even at 1.7B + 3 epochs, confirming it is a training-data gap, fixable with a data addition before any release claim.
• The model never fetches URLs. It cannot tell you where a link actually resolves, only what the visible string suggests. A lexically-clean URL can still be malicious.
• Not a replacement for a bank's fraud line, a national anti-fraud service, or human judgment. The recommended action always routes to your own channel.
• Text only at v1: no image/OCR, no audio, no attachment parsing, no email-header/routing analysis.

---

Training data

• Public seed layer (relabeled): UCI SMS Spam Collection (CC BY 4.0), enron_ham (SetFit/enron_spam ham slice; no explicit license → reference/research-use), phishing_email (zefang-liu; LGPL-3.0). Relabeled into the verdict+tactic scheme with the evidence kill-switch; per-source human spot-check kept relabel disagreement under the 10% gate.
• Synthetic layer: generated from specs (tactic × channel × language × register), including a suspicious middle-ground tier and adversarial keyword-evasion paraphrases (the hard subset). Every bench-destined message passes a sanitizer audit (reserved domains, non-dialable phones).
• Balance: ≥45% legitimate messages, RO ≥35%, ~40% of RO diacritic-free, suspicious ~14.5% of the SFT train set.
• Split discipline: synthetic by spec-family, public by source-text hash; paraphrases follow their parent's split. Train ∩ ScamGuardBench = ∅ (contamination-verified).

Both sizes trained from the same data; the size decision is evidence-based (above).

Fine-tuning

CUDA full-budget 3-epoch LoRA (training/train_cuda.py, transformers + PEFT + trl SFTTrainer), from Qwen/Qwen3-1.7B. LoRA rank 16 / alpha 32 / dropout 0.05, all-linear modules, adamw, cosine 2e-5→2e-6 with 60-step warmup, effective batch 4, seq 1280, bf16, gradient-checkpointing, seed 20260703; 3 real epochs on an on-demand NVIDIA L4 (3h21m, 0 OOM), thinking disabled. This supersedes the MLX first pass (1 epoch, bounded by Metal stalls); the full budget bought +5.4 macro-F1 points in-distribution.

Base-model note. The exact repo Qwen3-1.7B-Instruct does not exist on Hugging Face — Qwen3 merged instruct+thinking into the single base repo Qwen/Qwen3-1.7B (instruction-capable, Apache-2.0). We fine-tune it with thinking disabled.

---

Dual-use statement

We release a detector, a benchmark, and pattern-level explanations. We do not release the scam-variant generation prompts as a standalone tool. Public benchmark scam texts carry no real dialable phone numbers and no working URLs (reserved/example domains and clearly-fake numbers only). Output explanations describe the manipulation pattern, never instructions for constructing one.

Links

• Sibling model (on-device pick, 0.6B): flowxai/scam-guard-qwen06b — smallest, fastest footprint (~0.4 GB int4).
• Benchmark / dataset: flowxai/scamguardbench.

License

Apache-2.0 (weights, code, and benchmark). Base model Qwen/Qwen3-1.7B is Apache-2.0.