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Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

spa.mnesty.com

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Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#61

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

jdietrich wrote: post #19
superasn wrote: 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…

Jolly Rogers is keeping marketer calls busy in a loop. hilarious stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424031

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#62

Post by gerdesj »

StavrosK wrote: post #26
kevin_nisbet wrote: post #18

Earlier 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 request people to home sub-domains or even register full domains for you and populate MX records etc. You simply have to test the domain records before sending. You could periodically generate a TXT record, say annually, that should be updated.

I already support several projects like this.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#63

Post by masswerk »

jdietrich wrote: post #35
Tempest1981 wrote: post #30

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.

Maybe, rather than investing more into Lenny, create some more personas (voice, gender, etc) to add to the variety between calls? Maybe also have an option to hand a call over to the next persona in lengthy calls (so that the caller has to start all over again, in order to explain the issue to the "room mate", "brother", "cousin", etc)...

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#64

Post by icefo »

breakingcups wrote: post #56

I once made something very similar, back then it was called an autobaiter by the scambaiting community. It would actually figure out what kind of scam the spammer was pulling and adjust its script in kind to pretend to play along with the scammers script. I should dig that up again.

That sounds interesting, please do !

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#66

Post by StavrosK »

Animats wrote: post #34

That'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? [1] https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/cturvzsr/

I was curious about that too and checked, but couldn't find anything. It goes by the X-Reply-To (IIRC) header and they matched.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#67

Post by UltraFlynn »

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.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#68

Post by StavrosK »

dgellow wrote: post #60

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!

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#69

Post by StavrosK »

phantom_oracle wrote: post #38

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.

I love Gitlab, I put most of my projects there these days and mirror them on Github.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#70

Post by JumpCrisscross »

UltraFlynn wrote: post #67

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.
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