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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsSend scam emails to this chatbot and itll waste their time for you
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16632724/scam-chatbot-ai-email-rescam-netsafeChatbots. Theyre usually a waste of your time, so why not have them waste someone elses instead? Better yet: why not have them waste an email scammers time.
Thats the premise behind Re:scam, an email chatbot operated by New Zealand cybersecurity firm Netsafe. Next time you get a dodgy email in your inbox, says Netsafe, forward it on to me@rescam.org, and a proxy email address will start replying to the scammer for you, doing its very utmost to waste their time. You can see a few sample dialogues in the video above, or check out a longer back-and-forth below.
It looks infuriatingly effective.
Using chatbots to give email scammers a taste of their own medicine isnt that new. And although Netsafe has made a very fancy looking video promo for their bot, the technology behind it is relatively simple; relying more on pre-programmed conversational misdirects than sophisticated artificial intelligence.
Really, though, thats all it takes. Another famous chatbot time-waster is Lenny, which is designed to waste telemarketers time, and does so without any AI or speech recognition component. Instead, Lenny uses just 16 pre-recorded snippets of dialogue, each of which is as vague and ambiguous as possible. Lenny simply waits until theres a gap in the conversation, then plays one of its bits of dialogue, cycling through all 16 in various patterns.
The technique is surprisingly effective, as the video below shows. (Youll feel sorry for the caller before long.)
Thats the premise behind Re:scam, an email chatbot operated by New Zealand cybersecurity firm Netsafe. Next time you get a dodgy email in your inbox, says Netsafe, forward it on to me@rescam.org, and a proxy email address will start replying to the scammer for you, doing its very utmost to waste their time. You can see a few sample dialogues in the video above, or check out a longer back-and-forth below.
It looks infuriatingly effective.
Using chatbots to give email scammers a taste of their own medicine isnt that new. And although Netsafe has made a very fancy looking video promo for their bot, the technology behind it is relatively simple; relying more on pre-programmed conversational misdirects than sophisticated artificial intelligence.
Really, though, thats all it takes. Another famous chatbot time-waster is Lenny, which is designed to waste telemarketers time, and does so without any AI or speech recognition component. Instead, Lenny uses just 16 pre-recorded snippets of dialogue, each of which is as vague and ambiguous as possible. Lenny simply waits until theres a gap in the conversation, then plays one of its bits of dialogue, cycling through all 16 in various patterns.
The technique is surprisingly effective, as the video below shows. (Youll feel sorry for the caller before long.)
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Send scam emails to this chatbot and itll waste their time for you (Original Post)
IronLionZion
Nov 2017
OP
Yeah, that's all well and good until the bots figure out how to run the scams themselves
jberryhill
Nov 2017
#3
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)1. How can I get "Lenny" to handle my day long robocalls? n/t
sharp_stick
(14,400 posts)2. For the first time in years
I'm anxiously waiting for my next Nigerian prince or more recently, dude who's managed to hack my computer.
The newest scam I received. I got an email saying that he'd hacked my computer and accessed the camera and microphone. He now had, probably, hours of video of me "watching" porn and unless I sent him $200 USD in BitCoin he was going to send the video to my entire email address book.
My computer has no camera dude.
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)3. Yeah, that's all well and good until the bots figure out how to run the scams themselves
wryter2000
(46,037 posts)4. Has anyone done this?
I'd love to give it a try.