This AI drives spammers crazy

VIDEO – A New Zealand association has created a program that responds to phishing emails for you, asking you lots of questions to push spam campaign authors to their limits.

I'm tired of Spam emails? Those emails that assure you that the tax authorities overcharged you and want to compensate you, or that these emails are supposed to come from a woman who is crazy about you and wants to marry you on the condition that you pay her for the trip to you? What if I take? Scammers At their own game?

What the New Zealand organization Netsafe has to offer should interest you: it has created Re:Scam, an artificial intelligence that hunts spammers. In other words, you start an endless conversation with the spammer by bombarding him with questions.

The procedure is very simple, and the service is completely free. Simply forward your spam to the email address [email protected]. The AI, which introduces itself in this video as “anyone, no one,” will then respond to the spammer – a bot most of the time – and thus gain their “attention”.

The AI ​​will provide him, for example, with a (fake) bank account number, but by sending him an email with the number in order, it assures him to “avoid detection”, as we see in the published demo video. By NetSafe. Or he's confirmed his desire to become Illuminati/marry Anastasia, but you have “some questions” first.

Sometimes very funny conversations.

It even introduces minor grammatical errors into its messages and changes the response time to make it more “human” and to better fool spammers. She also promises to send you a transcript of her conversations with the spam bot, which are “quite funny sometimes,” Netsafe confirms.

The New Zealand organization is an independent, non-profit association whose mission is to use technology to address new challenges presented by digital technology. For example, it offers tools – all free – to combat online harassment and computer hacking.