Using AI To 'Clap Back' At Phone Scammers (bbc.com) 92
New submitter ytene writes: As covered by a fascinating and hilarious video from the BBC, Twitch Streamer and YouTube star, Kitboga, has teamed up with some software developers to produce an AI that can interact directly with phone scammers. Although only brief samples of the solution at work were shown in the clip, the reporter suggests that it has worked for periods of up to 30 minutes. Will this be enough to finally put an end to the phone scammers, or do you think even more drastic steps will be required?
Re:So, (Score:5, Interesting)
They don't have to, they just have to fool telescammers for awhile. And everyone knows they're sub-human.
I think this is a great idea. The US govt's telco lobbies are fighting hard to keep the scammers in business (since they're such good customers), and India's having a hard time dealing with them, so we're left with raising their cost of doing business. The only reason they're doing it is it's profitable. Take that away and it'll thin the herd.
They have to be able to pay their callers, keep at least a few sweatshops rented at a time for fast moves, and those bribes aren't cheap, so they're not really running on that big of a margin. If you can drop their caller productivity in $/hour into the toilet, you can lower their operating budget enough that they're less effective at outrunning and bribing the locals that keep them afloat.
At some point in the future I expect to see a big public exposure of the US telcos' process of complicity and lobbying to keep regulators off their backs to keep the telescammers in business. I miss Mike Wallace and his 60-minutes exposes of scammers. Sometimes it takes someone with a bright flashlight to light up the dark corners and send the cockroaches scurrying for cover. We need someone to take up the fight like that. Any takers?
Re:So, (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. I am pleased to see more are engaged in this kind of response.
About 5 years ago (as covered here https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]) someone launched a to do just this, though at the time as I understand things, the amount of AI involved was minimal, but over the years I've found it to be useful to annoy them a bit. Seeing this though, I look forward to the next step.
Re:So, (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: So, (Score:1)
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Actually, a lot of the scam calls I see give caller unknown as the caller ID and often a number that appears to be from a residential customer. The few I have actually heard sound like they are actually a foreign call center.
It would be helpful if "unknown" was substituted with origin information the phone network actually does have. I find it hard to believe that the phone company would have no idea who to bill for 90% of the calls going through their network.
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Caller ID is just a bolt on on top of regular POTS, securing it and the implications of doing so are huge... and unlike email providers working to move away from legacy things like SMTP, the phone companies are regulated up the wazoo... so we'll need the feds to be onboard, which is happening in part: https://www.fcc.gov/call-authe... [fcc.gov]
There is a downside to this, it will make harder a useful weapon against them. Here we are talking about incoming calls doing spoofing to hide the origin of the bad guys, but w
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I'm sure that information exists. Now, kindly tell us how we can sign up to receive that information and display it with the incoming call. We'll wait right here. Looking forward to the answer.
Re: So, (Score:1)
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They're passed the Turing test?
Scammers like to target victims who are themselves too old to pass the Turing test.
The guy is amazing (Score:3)
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Calling to get crank called (Score:2)
When you are bored, they make for great entertainment.
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Isn't it enough just to waste their time? Why take pleasure in the suffering of others?
I don't know that I could feel good about myself after making some poor girl in a third-world sweatshop feel bad.
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So you're solution is to ... become scum yourself?
The person you're talking to is working a shit job. They're not likely to be the ones running the scam. Hell, they might not even know that they're doing dishonest work.
For some reason I'm reminded of those assholes that pissed on a homeless man...
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No, the people doing the job know EXACTLY what they're doing. They're doing it because it pays well. They can early a few hundred dollars a night, which is far more than they can earn legitimately.
Plenty of coverag
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They are not working a job, unless you think a burglar or a pickpocket is "working a job". They are criminals. Listen to the calls sometime. They trick people into buying gift cards and sending them the codes. These people are utter scum and deserve all the abuse you can throw at them. You think that's harsh? In a just world, they'd be in prison.
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Vengeance isn't justice. In a just world, anti-social vigilantes like you would be in prison. People like you are worse than the scammers, as you abuse people for pleasure.
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Uh-huh. How long did he keep you on the line before you realized you weren't going to be able to rip him off?
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Making people miserable for doing bad stuff is the most basic form of behavioral correction. In absence of actual justice, this will have to do. As anyone who has ever been bullied damn well knows: You fight the bully if you can. If you don't want vigilantism, even in this extremely mild form, then bring the scum to justice before people take matters into their own hands.
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Making people miserable for doing bad stuff is the most basic form of behavioral correction.
Nonsense. We don't torture people as punishment nor do we think torture is corrective in any way.
. In absence of actual justice, this will have to do.
Vengeance isn't justice. Vigilantes are criminals. The only "scum" here are the sociopaths who take pleasure in the suffering of others. People like you should be locked away before they hurt someone.
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No, vigilantes are not necessarily criminals. People who break the law are criminals. You need to stop making excuses for criminals while accusing their victims.
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vigilantes are not necessarily criminals.
Vigilantes claim to enforce the law when they have no legal authority to do so. Vigilantism is illegal.
What crimes to vigilantes commit? Harassment, assault, and vandalism ... sometimes even murder.
You read too many comic books. Vigilantes aren't heroes, they're criminals. Perhaps the recent popularity of super hero television shows and movies has twisted your sense of morality?
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Then this isn't vigilantism. Nobody who ridicules, berates or insults scammers or wastes their time does it to enforce the law. What they do is like the reaction you'd get for violating social norms in public. It's how people let people know when they're out of bounds. Negative feedback for bad behavior is critical for functioning societies. It's a long long way from justice and an equally long way from harassment, assault, vandalism and murder. Now fuck off, I have other trolls to attend to.
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You can't justify anti-social behavior by claiming it's essential to a functioning society. That's absurd.
It's long past time for you to grow up and act like a reasonable adult.
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For some reason I'm reminded of those assholes that pissed on a homeless man...
What the hell?
The people pulling the scam, unlike that homeless man are not harmless, they are trying to steal money from the unwary. They might be working a shit job, so is it OK if they steal from someone rich? What if they steal from someone poor? Is that suddenly not OK?
Personally I always try to waste their time simply to make the scamming unprofitable, for the same reason I report burglaries to the police.
My intent isn't to
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The problem is your completely black and white thinking. You aren't the good guy fighting a bad guy. You're both bad guys.
Yes, the scammers are wrong to run the scam. The caller may or may not be knowingly a scammer, but it doesn't matter as, in either case, it is wrong to try to make them suffer.
Your mother might have taught you that "two wrongs don't make a right".
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Yes, the scammers are wrong to run the scam. The caller may or may not be knowingly a scammer, but it doesn't matter as, in either case, it is wrong to try to make them suffer.
In other news: we should never send anyone to prison because it is wrong to make them suffer.
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We have laws and a justice system for a reason. It's not perfect, but that fact doesn't justify vigilantism!
We can talk about the differences between justice and vengeance as well, but it might be a waste of time. Once you start taking pleasure in the suffering of others, there isn't much hope for recovery.
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We have laws and a justice system for a reason. It's not perfect, but that fact doesn't justify vigilantism!
This isn't right, it's not even wrong.
There's no possibility of actual justice against a scammer half a world away. And it's no more vigilante justice than yelling at someone you notice in the act of thieving. I'm not doing anything illegal nor am I even doing anything unethical: it is not by any stretch unethical to make it not worth someone's time to scam me.
Once you start taking pleasure in the su
Re: The guy is amazing (Score:2)
Omg, we can't waste the time of those trying to rip off the elderly and others vulnerable to the scam they are pulling! That would be so wrong and impolite!
Unsorry I got 0 fucks to give about the 'poor employee' taking part in the mass scam.
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To use your example, the reason you think of that scenario is because the scammers are the ones pissing on the homeless guy. They are trying to find the weak and
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Sure, some scammers obviously know that they're scamming. The IRS and tech support scammers clearly know that they're running a scam. Others, not so much. The auto warranty scammers, for example, I can see thinking they're just doing ordinary sales. The same goes with a lot of the fundraising scams I've been getting.
That fact that a scammer knows that they're scamming, however, doesn't make it okay to abuse them. Vengeance isn't justice. As your mother might put it: "two wrongs don't make a right".
I
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its not about vengeance fucktard. It is about putting them off scamming others.
Do you honestly think that works? They'll just think that the people they're scamming are all assholes and that they're justified in scamming them. They might even start to enjoy ripping-off "assholes", compounding the problem!
How do you react when someone harasses you? Do you rethink your behavior or do you double-down?
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Every last one of us could probably increase our income by an order of magnitude by selling recreational drugs to school children. We don't because that would be wrong.
With most of the scams, it would be hard to not know it's a scam. The person calling me claiming to be the Attorney General talking to me about a late return to Blockbuster (yes, REALLY!) had to know that it was a scam.
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For sure, some scammers know. That still doesn't make it right to abuse them. I've said endlessly that "vengeance isn't justice" and that "two wrongs don't make a right." Did everyone forget these basic moral lessons from childhood?
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On the other hand, it's generally wrong to lock someone in a cage but if we DID sell recreational drugs to kids, that's probably what would happen sooner or later to at least a decent percentage of us.
Calling these people up at home and scamming them would perhaps be a bit over the top, but making them feel bad about doing bad things while they're doing those bad things is how people are convinced to stop doing bad things.
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We have laws and a system of justice for a reason.
Super hero movies have given you a warped sense of values. Vigilantes are criminals.
making them feel bad about doing bad things while they're doing those bad things is how people are convinced to stop doing bad things.
Offering moral guidance or other correction is very different from verbally abusing someone. It's also a lot more effective. Has screaming and cursing ever worked? If the scammer had any reservations about scamming people, being verbally abused just makes them feel justified. After all, they're just scamming asshole Americans, not good and decent people.
That some people
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When law enforcement leaves a vacuum, vigilantes fill in. The law has left a huge sucking void here. Want it done professionally? Demand that the professionals actually do something.
I did once give a U.S. based scammer hell and heard the phone thrown down and the woman angrily storming out. So I guess it works sometimes.
You seem very ready to understand the plight of the "poor innocent scammer" but unwilling to accept that after the 10th or so scam call of the day, people will vent sometimes. It's a form of
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Vigilantes are criminals. There is no difference between them and the scammers.
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What this tells me is that you know what you're doing is wrong, but really want to justify your actions. After all, you don't think you're a bad person.
Good people do shitty things all the time. That doesn't make them bad people. People make mistakes. Good people learn from them and try to do better in the future.
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That doesn't make it okay for you to abuse them. Again, two wrongs don't make a right.
You seem to think that because someone does something wrong, you're justified in treating them any way you want. People like you should be locked up.
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What is it that I'm doing, exactly? I'm not scamming people. I'm not enabling scammers. I waste their time and report them to the FTC. That's all anyone can do.
You take pleasure in abusing them and enjoy their suffering. That makes you a sociopath.
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Upsetting them doesn't do that. Obviously. That's just not how people work. That hero complex of yours is a clear sign that you're delusional.
Oh, yes, they're people. You justify your cruelty to others by dehumanizing them. That's bad, but what is unforgivable is the fact that you take pleasure in it! That indicates to me that you are an unstable and should be removed from society until you are no longer a danger to others.
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Odds are, the person you're talking to doesn't have much of a choice. Why compound the suffering?
We waste their time to make their scam less profitable. Being an asshole doesn't help you achieve that goal, it just makes you an asshole.
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Odds are, the person you're talking to doesn't have much of a choice. Why compound the suffering?
We waste their time to make their scam less profitable.
neither do many murderers thieves, drug dealers and a host of other criminals. Never the less if they intend to make you their victim rolling over and playing nice isn't going to win you any friends and it also does nothing to dissuade them from their actions for the next person. In essence you aren't having much of an effect on them profit wise, if you drive some of them out of it that is far more disruptive.
Being an asshole doesn't help you achieve that goal, it just makes you an asshole.
being an asshole does achieve that goal, someone that is upset is going to need time after the call
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If you think that being an asshole is a virtue, I can't help you.
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These people take money from the suffering of others and the telcos are in on it. If I was on a jury for a mass shooter who went into a scammy call center and executed every single person in the building, I would say "Not guilty", put on my headphones, and listen to thrash metal at maximum volume.
Then after deliberation and verdict, I would shake that man's hand and say "Thank you for your service."
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That's pretty sick. What's wrong with you?
Vengeance isn't justice.
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The fact that they are all "pretty much the same", is why the AI is easily programmable. All it pretty much has to do, is identify which type of fraud it's being faced with, and then the scammer usually has a script to follow, and the bot can just make that a really long process.
I couldn't watch the video, as the BBC link seems to use a technology my browser doesn't recognize, so I cant comment on the authors imagination in dealing with these scammers, but I was a while back following a group that was very
Lenny (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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OK...
OK...
Yep...
Sure...
Uh-huh...
OK...
Never say yes to scammers. (Score:2)
NEVER say "yes" (or anything like it) to phone scammers.
Some of them record the calls and then edit them to appear that you agreed to a contract.
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Sure. Courts would not.
However, consumer protections laws that require consent might. I know they do here in Europe. Ofcourse any consent can be revoked at any time too, so scammer dont really gain anything from it, as any subscriptions, packages, or other costly stuff they want to bill you, the sender will have to proove that consent is still in place. And again, I dont know how this works in the US, but here, if retraction of consent requires written form, then so does the consent.
I've been a member of th
Lenny (Score:2)
I used Lenny until my banker got caught by it, and felt obliged to be polite to the old geezer.
Years ago I developed a very simple intelligence test to distinguish robot callers from scammers: I asked the caller to press "1" to ring my phone. I figured I would make it more complex when the robots figured it out. I am still using the same test today.
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AI does need to improve on this however, as once understood the pattern is obvious and the scammer/coldcaller . An AI would have to take information and feed it back to the caller - essentially mirroring what the caller is saying to gain rapport - but should also have enough background information on the topic at hand so that it can make intelligent-sounding comments without simply relying on vague-isms.
That is actually a lot easier than most people think and doesn't require AI.
I wrote a chatbot more than 20 years ago that fooled most people for at least 10-15 minutes and a few people for over an hour. It was relatively simple and the main trick was exactly what you said: A very basic grammar parser that could pick out key words from replies and play them back in correct sentences, such as "sorry, what exactly did you mean with (verb) (object) ?"
In this case, the scammers are operating through call centers
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Aside from the Jolly Roger phone company bots, possibly the funniest bot that I have heard to deal with scammers so far has been "Lenny". E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Essentially it's an old man talking in circles, in a preset pattern.
It employs the old "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that could you start from the beginning" trick, multiple distractions that waste time, and a side of rambling on tangentially. Anyone who has ever visited a senior citizen to help them with something is very familiar with this! The bot also it uses very vague language so that the caller on the other end has to assume that he is on board with whatever the scammer/cold-caller is talking about, and it's amazing to hear that no matter what the call is about that it acts as a "catch-all".
AI does need to improve on this however, as once understood the pattern is obvious and the scammer/coldcaller . An AI would have to take information and feed it back to the caller - essentially mirroring what the caller is saying to gain rapport - but should also have enough background information on the topic at hand so that it can make intelligent-sounding comments without simply relying on vague-isms.
Many of the scanners are young people looking to get by. They are given a token wage, with some percentages. Do they like what they are doing? From what I noted, they do not. It is the job they have after university.
Glitterbomb trap is also working (Score:5, Interesting)
Mark Rober who made the glitterbomb trap [youtube.com] a few years back is also working on catching scammers [youtube.com].
It pretty cool to see Mark helping Police to catch and arrest the mules and work his way up the scammer chain of command.
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This is collaboration between Mark Rober and Jim Browning. Jim Browning has been doing the scam investigations for a long time now and he's managed to hack through the scammers to warn the victims and help the victims get their money back.
Here's the Jim Browning half of the glitterbomb video. ht [youtube.com]
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Thanks for mentioning the collaboration and the Jim Browning video!
Eliza? (Score:2)
As much as I'm a big fan of Kitboga, from the BBC video, it isn't clear how much more this is than a speech recognition package tied to something equivalent to Eliza, as it appears to have fixed responses that it can chose from. Come to think of it, Eliza did better than that, since it could integrate parts of the human's input into its responses. A good idea, yes, but can we call 1960s tech an AI?
Anyone know if Kitboga's project does more than just that?
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can we call 1960s tech an AI?
Considering that Eliza was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, who is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence, I would say yes, we can call 1960s tech AI.
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And how does that make you feel?
No one remembers Telecrapper 2000?? (Score:2)
I can't believe that no one remembered Telecrapper 2000. You don't need AI to mess with telemarketers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
famous first words (Score:2)
"just setting up my twttr"
"Mr. Watson come here, I want you."
"Is this thing on?"
Stanislaw Lem (Score:1)
This looks like it could evolve into stuff from some of the Stanislaw Lem books. An ironic satirical humoristic science fiction where technical development is led ad absurdum, including annoying robots countered by other robots, resulting in bickering among robots without human intervention.
Note that there are missing slashes because the very primitive Slashdot filter thinks two slashes between three words is ascii art.
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AHA! I had the filter do that to me a few weeks ago and couldn't be bothered to figure out why.
Quicker way (Score:1)
Sanctions against India are called for (Score:2)
if they are indian or similar descent (Score:1)
Opening scene of 1st Star Wars (Score:1)
Some of the telemarketers I've received are bots themselves. So bots will be arguing with bots. Almost as energy-wasteful as bitcoin.
Re: Opening scene of 1st Star Wars (Score:2)
Somehow I doubt even a million laptop batteries doing momentary time wasting of a scammer's time can equal the power of a smelting plant running 24/7 which one $hitcoin server farm uses
(This is why $hitcoin farms are often built in disused smelting plants, for the high capacity power feeds that those plants use and need to operate.)
My solution (Score:1)
It's honestly pretty depressing... (Score:2)
Even if you believe the telcos' claims that they are just too confused to trace the calls(which seems a bit suspect); we know that the NSA has had one hell of a go and keeping an eye on everything they can; and there are a great many places where a reaper is n