The Problem

Scam texts and phishing emails rely on people not looking closely. VERDICT does the close look for you: paste a message and get a verdict, a confidence score and the evidence behind it.

How It Works

• ML model: TF-IDF plus Multinomial Naive Bayes, trained on the 5,574-message SMS Spam Collection
• Link forensics: expands shortened URLs hop by hop, geolocates the host, flags raw-IP links
• Homoglyphs: detects look-alike Cyrillic and Greek letters hidden in words and domains
• Sender checks: free-mail providers, invalid numbers, VoIP/burner carriers
• Stack: Python, Flask, scikit-learn, pandas, phonenumbers, on Vercel

Security Engineering

Because the server fetches links that users paste, URL expansion validates every redirect hop and refuses private, loopback and link-local addresses (SSRF protection). All user-derived text is HTML-escaped before rendering, and uploads are size-capped and never stored. Built with Tate Nyoni as a CS 455 final project.