Two years spent spamming spammers back • Hacker News Board

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#41

Post by estefan » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:17 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #23

This is a great idea. Waste the spammer's time and it's no longer worth it. The phone version of this is Lenny[0], a set of audio files/Asterisk script which pretends to be a senile, doddering old man (who has a duck problem). There's a reddit user who runs a number you can forward your sales calls to, and he'll pick out the best ones and put on YouTube[1]. The record is keeping a caller on the phone for 56 minutes.…

This is great! I didn't know about Lenny :-D

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#42

Post by kensai » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:20 PM UTC

The dude deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for this. Literally pacifying the interwebs! :D

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#43

Post by wojcikstefan » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:22 PM UTC

Aren't most of these spam emails automated anyway? If it's just two bots talking, you're not really wasting anybody's time/resources.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#44

Post by the_duke » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

Hilarious idea.

But one of the first things I would have coded is preventing the same message to be sent again.

The examples are full of that.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#45

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:26 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #23

This is a great idea. Waste the spammer's time and it's no longer worth it. The phone version of this is Lenny[0], a set of audio files/Asterisk script which pretends to be a senile, doddering old man (who has a duck problem). There's a reddit user who runs a number you can forward your sales calls to, and he'll pick out the best ones and put on YouTube[1]. The record is keeping a caller on the phone for 56 minutes.…

[deleted]

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#46

Post by Dagwoodie » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:27 PM UTC

Based on the sample of 24 messages back and forth, it looks like the spammer also had a reply bot because a lot of messages exactly the same canned response.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#47

Post by wanderr » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:28 PM UTC

Back in the olden days, when the ping of death causing a windows BSOD was a thing, if I was online when I got spam I would immediately look for the spammer's ip and send them a ping of death. I could tell it often worked because then I'd get the same spam again 10 minutes later, so I'd do it to them again, then I'd get spammed again and ping them again until eventually they gave up.

I assume their mass mailing program would just start at the top of an email list and send them one by one, without tracking progress, so when the computer crashed they would have to start over. After a few crashes in a row hopefully the spammer would blame the spam sending program for crashing the computer and give up, maybe even demand a refund from whoever sold it to them.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#48

Post by McP » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:30 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #27

> Imagine if this type of thing happened in real-life. You walk out the door in the morning and you’re immediately attacked by Parul, Kevin, and Amelie. I laughed out loud at this, because it's exactly what I'm experiencing now in West Africa. Street vendors are aggressive about selling whatever they have, and they seem to assume I want it - almost like I owe it to them to buy it - I'm not sure if it's because I'm Wh…

I found that just looking at them with an unconcerned, disinterested expression, then carrying on my way did the trick.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#49

Post by brianwawok » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #44

Hilarious idea. But one of the first things I would have coded is preventing the same message to be sent again. The examples are full of that.

Indeed..

In fact why not take the inbound spams, and save those... and sprinkle them in to the outbound replies?

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#50

Post by nkozyra » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #4

It would be great if someone could implement this as a free public service, using neural algorithms to generate responses.

Actually I think a NN might require way too much supervision. You could feed exits (emails that got no response) into a decision tree to know what to send at any point in the chain to maximize response.