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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

#81

Post by tzakrajs »

masswerk wrote: post #63
jdietrich wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)...

This is brilliant.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#82

Post by ris »

I note the fake replies are quite limited & repetitive. It would be extremely interesting to see if deep Q learning could be used to develop more realistic replies. "rewards" would simply be getting more (and faster) responses.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#84

Post by squarefoot »

Great idea! Wasting spammers time is one of the very few ways of making them effectively lose money. Still the project needs some pseudo randomization in order to fool basic research. Some of the messages I read contained the sentence "I am a bit busy now, but I am definitely interested. When can we talk?". If one searches for that sentence in quotes Google returns four pages of references to Spamnesty. A slightly more clever spammer would sense the trap in minutes. I'm not aware of any program capable of add some entropy to a sentence maintaining its semantics and readability (save for insertion of random errors), but one could use a translator in different languages. Say English->German->Russian->Spanish->Polish->Danish->English, then send the resulting string as a reply. The above string for example becomes: "Now I'm a bit busy, but I'm definitely interested. When can we speak?" which (almost) fools the search. Almost because the 1st page still contains a couple references to Spamnesty due to the above sentences strong similarity, but they're well buried together with other completely unrelated stuff.

BTW, pairing this with a personal assistant stripped of any access to personal information/property/devices (such as an hypothetical open source cloudless one) and instructed to ask for details on every possible part of the offer, one could make the perfect weapon against phone telemarketers as well.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#86

Post by nkkollaw »

This is great, but I feel like it's wrong that regular people think they have to step in to fight spam.

After all, these messages benefit actual companies. I receive many spam messages from American companies that are legit. Why can't governments do more to fight spam? It's illegal after all (at least in Italy and I'd guess Europe), so how come companies get away with it?

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#88

Post by joering2 »

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…

On my list "todo" for 2018 -- ThisIsBenny.com -- website with bunch of buttons every one of them different phrase so when marketer is calling you, you can put on speakerphone and "lenny" them yourself :)

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#89

Post by pishpash »

nkkollaw wrote: post #86

This is great, but I feel like it's wrong that regular people think they have to step in to fight spam. After all, these messages benefit actual companies. I receive many spam messages from American companies that are legit. Why can't governments do more to fight spam? It's illegal after all (at least in Italy and I'd guess Europe), so how come companies get away with it?

The companies aren't in the jurisdiction of those laws. Now if you held the ISP's responsible, you'd see some action.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#90

Post by dspillett »

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…

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 make my who day's quota on this daft old coot". At that point "but it is my job" really doesn't cut it.
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