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Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

spa.mnesty.com

51–60 of 162 posts

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#51
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could check if the MX records still point at your service, or, better yet, send a test e-mail to that domain every so often and see if it reaches your service.

Indeed, but it's added complexity and I'm not sure how many people would bother setting the DNS records I asked for. I might try it at some point, though.

This is HN, I’m sure there’s plenty of us who have spare unused domains that would do it.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#53
post #9

Well done. It does get the spammers frustrated. I remember reading about a similar thing[1] where instead of emails it was automated telephone replies and the scammers were cussing at the bots and generally super confused. It did also manage to flood their phone lines making their call center useless for a while. [1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8wg4/we-talked-...

Some magnificent genius has created the perfect bot for hooking predatory telemarketers. "Lenny" is a slightly confused elderly man with poor hearing. He wanders off topic, he isn't sure what you just said and he is absolute catnip for crooks. If you haven't heard a call to Lenny, you're in for an absolute treat. This call from a tech support scammer lasts an exhausting 31 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJT…

This is great! Instead of trying to be smart, Lenny capitalizes on prejudices about elderlies and possible communication factors regarding non-native call center operatives. It's more social engineering than a conversational bot. – Well done.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#54
post #45

What we really need is something like this for the phone scammers, particularly the "IRS" scam I've been getting regulars calls from most of this year.

Someone made a call bot called "Lenny" to fool telemarketers, which uses recorded messages. They put up their call logs on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nO...

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well done. And the ducks -- hilarious! Now how do you scale and vary this enough, to prevent suspicion? That's the next step. Near the end (28 min), it felt like the caller was probing with "can you hear me" to collect Lenny's canned responses. Would it be better to hang up earlier to avoid suspicion?

"Lenny" is only 21 short recordings, stitched together into a crude sequence. It's a remarkably unsophisticated trick on a technical level. It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget. Tweak the script a bit, get someone on Fiverr to record it and you've got a new and unrecognisable Lenny MkII.

Lenny being 'just' a bunch of unchanging messages in unchanging order made it all the funnier and more amazing to me (and it was completely brilliant before I realised).

I remember first seeing it a while ago, posted here, ironically (or perhaps naturally) in a thread about Spamnasty (also excellent).

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#56
I once made something very similar, back then it was called an autobaiter by the scambaiting community. It would actually figure out what kind of scam the spammer was pulling and adjust its script in kind to pretend to play along with the scammers script.

I should dig that up again.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#57
post #34

That's a cute idea. But I wonder if the system is mis-matching messages and replies.[1] How did a spam for fake Ray-Ban sunglasses turn into someone wanting app development? [1] https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/cturvzsr/

I'd bet that it is an IT company in India that had a compromised email server that sent spam. The mails look kinda legit, except for the first one.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well done. And the ducks -- hilarious! Now how do you scale and vary this enough, to prevent suspicion? That's the next step. Near the end (28 min), it felt like the caller was probing with "can you hear me" to collect Lenny's canned responses. Would it be better to hang up earlier to avoid suspicion?

"Lenny" is only 21 short recordings, stitched together into a crude sequence. It's a remarkably unsophisticated trick on a technical level. It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget. Tweak the script a bit, get someone on Fiverr to record it and you've got a new and unrecognisable Lenny MkII.

This sounds like something you could reasonably crowdfund, while delivering a really useful product.
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