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Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

spa.mnesty.com

121–130 of 162 posts

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#121

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.

I'd love to see it as an app with a blacklist for spam numbers or telemarketers. Use a better text generation engine like a modern deep learning based generative model, and deep voice or crowd-sourced recordings.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#122
I liked the idea of increasing the amount of time a spammer expends over their email.

I didn't like the idea of having to manually forward the email, manually remove personal information from the body of the email, and sucking the recipient into watching the conversation unfold live. Because it increases the amount of time a recipient expends over a spam email.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#123
I tried this when it was new, and saw two issues with it. Firstly, it uses western names as the responder, which may not be the best case everywhere — ideally the person submitting the email should be able to specify a name to use. Secondly, the mnesty name and Mnesty LLC wouldn't seem believable to many (human) spammers either, depending on the region. I didn't get responses for many emails I submitted — my guess is that the spammers thought it's a waste of time (which is also good, but not frustrating them enough).

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If they didn't try to get the sale, they'd probably get fired and swapped with someone who would.

The capitalist's Nuremberg defense?

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#126
Honestly, why don't we get insider / whistleblower posts here on HN ? I understand spamming is quite vilified among most techies, but someone is doing the spamming. Is it because the bulk of spamming is done using very unsophisticated ways ? We get anonymous posts on pretty much all other topics.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#128
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-...

[deleted]

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#129
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…

Wow.

Does it count as passing the Turing test, or the scammers don't count as experts?

Come to think of it, the scammers themselves would fail the Turing test.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#130

Email isn't free. It seems like it is but actually it takes significant resources to process all the spam. Using a bot to create more traffic is pointless and wasteful. Yours sincerely, A guy who runs the mail transfer agents for an email security provider and has to deal with this every day.

Cool. Stop the spam and I’ll quit spamming you back.

We do. That's exactly what we do. But honestly the volume of spam is massive already.
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