It looks like in many cases [1] it's confusing the threads? Subjects and discussions start changing after a few messages in many threads I looked at.
Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
31–40 of 162 posts
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#32Had a good chuckle reading through the chat logs, but it would be interesting to see the results using NLP to formulate new nonsense questions aimed at the spammer.
The spammer side seems to also employ some level of bot automation, and its like two bots going at each other with the occasional broken english comment showing confusion and frustration....this is truly golden.
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#33Hmm. Tried it and the email bounced back with:
“554 Recipients' domain disabled”
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#34That'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?
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
"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.
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#36I saw www.rescam.org on here a while ago, definitely worth a visit!
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point, I've basically stopped answering my cell if I don't recognize the number. If it's important, they'll leave me a voicemail (it never is.). One other thing I did was ported my landline over to callcentric.com, where for $3.50/month or so, I can 'firewall' all calls coming to that number, making it safe to give out to anyone. Their call treatments allow me to, by specific number or patterns (800*), drop,…
I use google voice call announce for anyone not in my contact list
Is that a GV setting? Is it available on iOS?
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#38As 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.
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#39So it would be hilarious if you connected the spam asking for manuscripts[1] to the fake manuscript generating code [2]. We would end up with bot published journals.
Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but also being a bit more random where it's not trivial to filter the bot on the spammers side would make it just a little bit harder to ignore.
That's true. Unfortunately, it's not trivial to add more domains, as you'd need to own them all (to add DNS records for sending and receiving). I wanted to accept donations at some point, in the form of pointed DNS records, but realized that I couldn't do that without owning the domain, as if the domain lapsed or was transferred, Spamnesty wouldn't know and it would keep sending email from that domain, to no avail.
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.