LLM scam detection benchmarked: fitted TF-IDF baseline beats Jev, DeepSeek and local Qwen

justinbiebar · reddit · 2026-09-22

One author ran five engines on the same 1,000 job ads (53 scams; always-"legitimate" scores 94.7%). Results (accuracy/F1/PR-AUC): fitted TF-IDF baseline 0.970/0.700/0.780, hosted deepseek-v4.1-flash 0.948/0.329/0.282, Jev 0.947/0.312/0.276, GLiNER2.5 0.897/0.104/0.070, local Qwen2.5-1.5B with schema 0.053 — it emitted valid JSON for all ads but flagged every one as fraud at confidence 1.0.

Key takeaways: grammar constraints buy nothing — shape was never the hard part. Jev is well-calibrated (ECE 0.046) but its ranking is unusable, catching 7 of 53 scams at a 0.9 threshold. GLiNER2.5 breaks under pooled schemas (scores invert 0.998→0.141); one question per pass fixes it at 4x cost. The local 1.5B took 12.3s per ad on an M4; Jev handled the batch in one request. Caveats: the public dataset predates both LLMs, so their rows are an upper bound.

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