VIDEO: HILARIOUS CHATBOT WASTE SCAMMER'S TIME
A whopping $12 billion is lost, globally, to phishing scams. Even though most of the people you know, besides maybe your grandmother who desperately needs money, are not going to be fooled – there are indeed other people that do fall for these phishing scams.
Fellow humans over at New Zealand cybersecurity company, Netsafe, came up with the hilarious, and very effective, idea – an anti-scam defence tool called Re:scam; a chatbot that wastes scammers' time so you don't have to.
To delete and ignore scam emails is an easy way to avoid some personal headaches, but it just kicks the can down the road instead of solving the bigger problem. The scammers will immediately target someone else, so what makes Re:scam so brilliant is that it acts almost like a fly trap for shady online characters.
As the video, below demonstrates: you simply forward the scam email to me@rescam.org, and the AI will begin conversing with the scammer. The AI is sophisticated enough to give the scammer false hope. The chatbot will seem like it is genuinely interested in Russain brides or Nigerian prince treatures or whatever.
Netsafe will even send you a summary of the conversation the bot has had with the scammer, and the company writes on their website, “sometimes they can be quite funny!”
Have a look at Re:scam chatbot in the video below: