Back in February we told you about The Jolly Roger Telephone Company, an initiative aimed at putting an end to phone scams that pose as Microsoft tech support. A couple of months later we came across Project Mayhem, a flooder that calls fraudsters more than 25 times per second. Now it's the turn of Re:scam, an artificial intelligence platform that holds long, absurd and tedious conversations with the scammers who contact us by email hoping for a quick buck.
Looking back at all the spam I've received, I can say I've won the lottery at least eight times, been contacted by Arab princes with business proposals on several occasions, UPS and FedEx have roughly 700 packages of mine, and copies of Louis Vuitton wallets are an excellent side income. While our email addresses are "merchandise" that different spam campaigns buy, sell and exchange online, the truth is that if someone falls into the trap, sooner or later they will get the attention of a human being willing to refine the scam. That's where Re:scam steps in.
Basically, the idea is that a bot takes over the conversation in our place and extends it for as long as possible, until the scammer loses patience. The bot has different personalities, asks many questions, shares anecdotes, and makes typing errors to further deceive scammers. The official page has some examples of scams, including one from the African Affairs Bureau, and another classic where we need to pay a transfer fee using Western Union in exchange for a million-dollar sum. There we can see the kind of responses the bot sends, and I must admit they are very irritating... exactly what these scammers deserve.
Re:scam is a development of the New Zealand company Netsafe. Its CEO Martin Cocker stated that with each fake conversation, the bot can expand its vocabulary, incorporate new phrases, and optimize its personalities to deepen the deception. In the short time it has been online, Re:scam has already sent more than 20,000 emails and made scammers lose the equivalent of two months. How do we participate? Very simple: Once we receive the original email, we forward it to me@rescam.org, and the bot will take care of the rest.
