We have all received scam phone calls and emails at some point in our lives, some of them more convincing than others, and for the most part we usually just ignore them. However what if you could get back at these scammers by wasting their time? After all by wasting their time, it could mean less time that they spend trying to scam others, right?
That’s pretty much what the folks at Netsafe in New Zealand are trying to do with the creation of an email bot called Re:scam. Basically how it works is when you receive a scam email, all you have to do is forward it to me@rescam.org and from there it will work its magic. Just like a bot, it will attempt to have conversations with the scammer in a bid to waste their time and hopefully make them stop trying.
According to Netsafe, who is an independent, non-profit organization in New Zealand that focuses on online safety, “Re:scam can take on multiple personas, imitating real human tendencies with humour and grammatical errors, and can engage with infinite scammers at once, meaning it can continue an email conversation for as long as possible. Re:scam will turn the table on scammers by wasting their time, and ultimately damage the profits for scammers.”
We’re not sure how effective the bot will be, but either way we suppose it only takes a second for you to forward a scam email and if it ends up wasting the scammer’s time, even better.
Filed in . Read more about AI (Artificial Intelligence).