Non-profit organisation Netsafe has launched Re:scam – an email bot designed to combat scammers by wasting their time
While spam might just seem like a nuisance over $12 billion is lost globally to phishing scams every year.
Re:scam pitches itself as an artificially intelligent email bot. The idea is simple – you forward your email to Re: scam and it wastes scammers time with a never-ending series of questions and anecdotes so that scammers.
The more time it wastes, the less time scammers have to pursue real people.
Not only can the chatbot take on multiple personas (imitating real human tendencies with both humour and grammatical errors) it can engage with huge numbers of scammers at once and will continue an email conversation for as long as possible.
The hope is that the service will be able to turn the table on scammers by ultimately damaging their profits.
Simply forward your spam to [email protected]