Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

news.virginmediao2.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 277 posts

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#151

Post by plagiarist »

connicpu wrote: post #114
kabdib wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reductio ad absurdum: we're back to Pony Express

Bulk scams by mail are at least less common because mail fraud is investigated pretty seriously and results in federal felony charges. Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher. Unfortunately individuals are still sometimes targeted.

The physical mail spammers know to only use deceptive tricks, like "FINAL NOTICE" or pretending to be affiliated with you using some publicly available information. I have not yet seen one dare to full-on lie, because there would be real consequences.

If a scammer puts "FINAL NOTICE" on a solicitation they mailed with no prior relationship, I do still report it as fraud. But that's probably wishful thinking.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#152

Post by ryandrake »

Whenever I go home to visit my elderly parents, I'm amazed at how many scam calls they get. Like at least 4 or 5 an hour. And they pick up each one because they're from a time when you simply pick up your phone when it rings, and they won't change their habits.

It's long past time that phone calls should stop being synchronous and immediate. They are only this way because historic landlines were synchronous and immediate, and nobody changed it. This functionality should be culturally unacceptable in 2024.

Imagine if the concept of a land line never existed. Then, a startup came out with an app that: 1. allowed random people to cause your handheld device to stop what it was doing and immediately ring and vibrate and pop up a dialog over whatever app was active, 2. when you pushed a button, an instant two way audio channel was initiated, and 3. they could do all this without any authentication whatsoever--just needing to know a non-secret 10 digit number. This kind of app would fail every App Store guideline, and it would be laughed out of the ecosystem as unacceptable to end users. But in reality, it's "The Phone App" that comes pre-installed on your damn phone!! Insane that this kind of application is acceptable.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#153

Post by Ocha »

bsdice wrote: post #135

The scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this day. And has been for 10 years. A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable. It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voic…

Screen unknown callers to VM. Solved all my problems

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#155

Post by ethbr1 »

bawolff wrote: post #109
xnx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My attention is valuable. I should be able to sell it on my terms.

Is it though? Like it might be valuable to you, but i doubt its valuable to anyone else in a phone call situation and both parties need to find value to make a sale. Like if you are interested in the convo then you should be paying the other person as you are getting value from the convo. What's the situation where you don't care about the convo but for the right price you could care, and the other party also thinks…

> What's the situation where you don't care about the convo but for the right price you could care, and the other party also thinks that price is reasonable?

Minimally targeted advertising.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#156

Post by plagiarist »

swores wrote: post #58
tokioyoyo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And maybe like a temporary hold of the money, so you get it back if I’m convinced it’s not spam. Probably would resolve 99% of spam issues in the real world and create a chain of trust. Add some temporary disabling feature as well if you’re expecting a call from a random number too, so you’re set.

Sounds like a great solution to the minority of people like you and me who wouldn't mind the added steps of approving every real phone call as not spam after, having to remember how to set that you're expecting a call from a random number, etc. I can't see it being acceptable to enough people for any network to go down this road unless spam levels get way worse.

Reporting spam should be the other way around, it defaults to assuming a normal interaction.

Consider: if you get harassed with a call or text you don't like, you send an SMS with that phone number to some known short code. You then receive $1 from the caller. If the caller cannot be found, the last verifiable link in the chain is responsible for paying the fine.

This would cause carriers to behave overnight, instead of allowing foreign call centers to spoof other people's real private numbers with your area code.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#157

Post by Lio »

dmurray wrote: post #13

This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy". When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy". And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't d…

I think you mean Lenny[1] not Lemmy. Although I think it would be incredibly funny to have scammers talking to the voice of Lemmy[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#158

Post by mos_basik »

xnx wrote: post #23

Seems like the logical endpoint of a lot of this is people getting paid directly for their attention. Want to call me? I've set a price of $5/call that I answer, and an additional $10/minute of listen time after the first 10 seconds. Want to send me an email? $1/email and $5/100 words. Anyone I have emailed is automatically on my allow-list, which I can also adjust manually.

That's EVE Online's approach to fighting ingame "email" spam [0].

Every player can configure an amount of ingame money that is levied from a sender's account to deliver a message to them. It's a currency sink, so it's themed as a "tax" levied by the NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the recipient of the message.

I thought it used to default to 5 ISK (a pittance, something you can make back by shooting a single NPC pirate ship). I see some references to the default being ~2000 ISK at the time that it was changed to 0, where it is now.

Worked pretty well, imo. Players that need to be publicly contactable (people who organize public events, for instance) can turn it off easily. People who are "space famous" can crank it up to reduce targeted spam. Even at the default setting, it's effective at keeping ingame scammers from blasting the whole player list with messages (at least, the poor ones :). Doesn't apply to people you've already exchanged messages with. I think there's also some allowlisting you can do, etc.

0. https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_Mail#CONCORD_Spam_Prevent...

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#159

Post by immibis »

ethbr1 wrote: post #147
connicpu wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bulk scams by mail are at least less common because mail fraud is investigated pretty seriously and results in federal felony charges. Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher. Unfortunately individuals are still sometimes targeted.

> Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher This is the thing we screwed up for email and phone (after per call fees dropped to zero). It's not rocket science to create systems that net to zero for common usage (balanced in-bound vs out-bound), but charge an arm and a leg for bulk senders.

Until you're running a file server or the equivalent. There has to be some way for a willing recipient to zero-rate or reverse-charge the responses to their requests. The Internet gets this wrong.
Post reply on HN