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Security Firm Creates Chatbot To Respond To Scam Emails On Your Behalf (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Chatbots. They're usually a waste of your time, so why not have them waste someone else's instead? Better yet: why not have them waste an email scammer's time. That's 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.
Anything that increases the cost of spam scams relative to the returns is worth investigating to see if it's practical, because ultimately you have to attack the economics to kill the beast.
I'd actually like to see this run on my local system, though.
These Nigerians are barely computer literate and barely literate at all. They will struggle to pass a Turing test themselves. I think that even Eliza level chatbots will fool them. The idea is that they will have to manually sift through thousands of emails per day to find the real mark, and I think that this idea will work.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It may be that figuring out what the email addresses are is not the hard part of scamming.