This is great, but I feel like it's wrong that regular people think they have to step in to fight spam. After all, these messages benefit actual companies. I receive many spam messages from American companies that are legit. Why can't governments do more to fight spam? It's illegal after all (at least in Italy and I'd guess Europe), so how come companies get away with it?
The companies aren't in the jurisdiction of those laws. Now if you held the ISP's responsible, you'd see some action.
I'd rather have ISPs act as utilities rather than safe-guards of the content they transmit...
Great idea! Wasting spammers time is one of the very few ways of making them effectively lose money. Still the project needs some pseudo randomization in order to fool basic research. Some of the messages I read contained the sentence "I am a bit busy now, but I am definitely interested. When can we talk?". If one searches for that sentence in quotes Google returns four pages of references to Spamnesty. A slightly mo…
> A slightly more clever spammer would sense the trap in minutes.
Spammers are going to develop anti-spam filters :)
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…
The thing that makes me angry with some of those recordings is when the callers still think that they are talking to a dotty old fellow who they can con (they usually cotton on to the trick in the end). When to my ears Lenny sounds like someone with dementia who needs help and should not under any circumstances be sold to without a legal guardian present, what they seem to take from the situation is "great, I might m…
I think this is a crucial aspect of Lenny's design. If the bot was just an asshole, you might gain some sympathy for the telemarketers. Their torment at the hands of Lenny feels entirely fair, because it's obvious that he is not fit to be making financial decisions. The more unscrupulous the caller, the longer they stay on the phone with Lenny; it's an elegant self-regulating mechanism.
As someone else mentioned here, the only risk is that spammers will blacklist mnesty.com . There should be some type of domain rotation (or you can test spoofing, just to see if spammers use the same anti-spoof software everyone else does), just like how spammers do so. As an aside, kudos for using gitlab instead of github.
If and when that happens, someone can pick up a suite of cheap domain names. Thanks to the proliferation of generic TLDs, you can register a domain for less than a dollar per year through a legitimate registrar.
OP here. Just to clarify, because I see a lot of congratulations. I just shared the project, I'm not the author. Based on the GitLab project, the author seems to be @stavros: - https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty - https://twitter.com/stavros - https://www.stavros.io/
Yep, that's me!
Nice idea, kudos! One curiosity though: I read a thread from the ones listed on the homepage and the signature of the Spamnesty emails said Mnesty LLC. If that's constant in every message the service sends out, wouldn't it be quite easy for the spammers to filter them out? Wouldn't you rather randomise sender details, including the signature?
Nice idea, kudos! One curiosity though: I read a thread from the ones listed on the homepage and the signature of the Spamnesty emails said Mnesty LLC. If that's constant in every message the service sends out, wouldn't it be quite easy for the spammers to filter them out? Wouldn't you rather randomise sender details, including the signature?
Thanks! There's only one sending domain, so it would be incongruous to randomize the signature, unfortunately...
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 quite easy to make into a phone app too, seeing how apps can intercept calls. Combine it with a phone number database like Whoscall, and one can get beautiful results.
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…
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?
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-...
A technique described in this podcast[1] may lock up quite some time with these people.