This A.I. Chatbot Will Get Revenge on Email Scammers For You
Bothered by spam and phishing emails? This bot can waste months of a spammer's time, and produces some hilarious results... and you can use it for free right now.
11 November, 2017
Mr Robot (USA Network)
<p></p><p class="p1">$12 billion is lost globally to phishing scams. While you may believe you could easily figure out that the email from your grandma who is desperately asking you for money is not really an email from your grandma, not all phishing scams are that obvious and many people fall for them. In fact, <a href="https://www.mcafee.com/us/about/news/2015/q2/20150512-01.aspx" target="_blank">a 2015 survey</a> done by Intel Security covering 1<span>9,000 respondents from 144 countries,</span> revealed that a staggering <span>80%</span><span> misidentified at least one phishing email.</span></p> <p></p><p class="p2"><span class="s1">Now, <a href="https://www.netsafe.org.nz/aboutnetsafe/" target="_blank">Netsafe</a>, a non-profit organization in New Zealand with a focus on online safety, is fighting back. With their new initiative called <a href="https://www.rescam.org/" target="_blank">Re:scam</a>, Netsafe has deployed a well-educated, artificially intelligent chat-bot that can take on multiple personalities and engage in correspondence with scammers, wasting their time indefinitely or until the scammers themselves realize they are being scammed.</span></p> <p></p><p><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="697e04ad85eee84c56b2e2d1536f2d79"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jPajqAJWiNA?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span></p> <p><!-- p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Helvetica; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Helvetica; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; min-height: 13.0px} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.Apple-tab-span {white-space:pre} --> </p><p></p><p class="p1"><span class="s1">The exchanges can be hilarious. Here is a sample of the bot's replies from a rather long email thread between the bot and a scammer posing as The Bureau of African Affairs and looking to extract personal and bank details.<span> </span></span></p> <p></p><p class="p2"><em>“Hi, was this letter supposed to go to me? It all seems quite a wee bit official like. I’ve never been beneficiaried before. Just want to make sure I’m who I am before I get too excited.”</em></p> <p></p><p class="p2"><em>“How soon can I expect to receive these funds? I owe a pretty significant amount to Readers Digest and need to pay them back before they take legal action.”</em></p> <p></p><p class="p2"><em>“Do you mean your business days or our business days? What time zone are you in?”</em></p> <p></p><p class="p1"><em><span class="s1">“I understand the urgency. Time is money as they say. Does that make ATM’s time machines? Just a thought I had. Anyway. Keen to move this along.”</span></em></p> <p></p><p class="p1">Engaging with the bot leaves less time for scammers to engage with real people. In addition, the emails that the chat bot receives help to develop its vocabulary and knowledge of scams. These emails also help with the collection of data about scammers’ locations and activities.</p> <p></p><p class="p1">Netsafe’s CEO Martin Cocker <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/10/new-zealand-chatbots-artificial-intelligence-scam-conversations" target="_blank">says</a>:</p> <p></p><blockquote><p class="p3"><span class="s1">“Everyone is susceptible to online phishing schemes and no matter how tech savvy you are, scammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Re:scam will adapt as the scammers adapt their techniques, collecting data that will help us to keep up and protect more people across New Zealand.”</span></p></blockquote><p> </p><p> </p><p></p><p class="p1">In just a few days Re:scam has already sent 26,609 emails and wasted more than 3 months worth of scammers’ time. So far, the longest exchange between a scammer and a chatbot was 20 emails long.</p> <p></p><p class="p1">To help the fight against scammers, instead of deleting your scam emails, you can forward them (old or new) to <a href="mailto:me@rescam.org"><span class="s2">me@rescam.org</span></a> and Netsafe will engage in a conversation on your behalf from a proxy email account.</p> <p></p><p class="p1">They will even send you a summary of the conversation the bot has had with the scammer and, as Netsafe writes on their website, “sometimes they can be quite funny!”</p> <p></p><p>Here's a great example of one below: </p> <p></p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="600" scrolling="no" src="https://www.scribd.com/embeds/364009377/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-MgejAkrExyePO9dRgXUA&show_recommendations=true" width="100%"></p> <p/><p> </p> <p/><div class="video-full-card-placeholder" data-slug="how-spam-predicts-the-stock-market" style="border: 1px solid #ccc;">
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Chatbots: The Simple Software That Could Remove Office Tedium
The saying in coding goes: if you have to do a job more than once, automate the task. Bots will one day unburden you from these tasks.
23 August, 2016
circa 1878: The actress Constance Collier in the show 'Oliver Twist'
<p>The saying in coding goes: if you have to do a job more than once, automate the task. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to automate answers to questions, like “What’s the Wi-Fi password?” and “Who’s the head of marketing?” Those questions typically come through via email. But <strong>bots will one day unburden you from having to answer these common office questions.</strong></p> <p>It’s the hope that one day, bots will liberate us from meaningless tasks, allowing us to concentrate on the tough questions.</p> <p>Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has openly stated, he wants people to get out of work early. Work hard when you're in the office and leave once you're done. "The most productive employees from my experience are those who go home at 5:30p.m., but are hyperfocused at work," Butterfield <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-ceo-stewart-butterfield-and-box-ceo-aaron-levie-bots-making-work-more-efficient-2016-8">said at a press gathering last week</a>. "People can only think really hard for six to eight hours a day."</p> <p>He believes giving bots the gift of artificial intelligence will save us from meaningless workday hours lost because of busywork and often-asked questions. He isn’t the first person to point out how unbeatable humans become when paired with a robot and visa-versa.</p> <p>Pentagon official Paul Scharre <a href="http://bigthink.com/natalie-shoemaker/former-pentagon-official-has-an-idea-for-how-we-can-avoid-a-robopocalypse">pointed out in a report</a> that when a human-AI team was pitted against just human or just AI opponents in chess, the human-AI team was unstoppable.</p> <p>“The AIs can analyze possible moves and identify vulnerabilities or opportunities the human player might have missed, resulting in blunder-free games,” Scharre explains. “The human player can manage strategy, prune AI searches to focus on the most promising areas, and manage differences between multiple Ais. The chess AI, or multiple AIs, gives feedback to the human player, who then decides what move to make.”</p> <p>Scharre was speaking more to human-AI teams on the battlefield. However, we may begin to see <strong>“<a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3058546/conversational-interfaces-explained" target="_blank">conversational user interfaces</a>” </strong>being built and offered through apps, like Slack. "It's an opportunity for us, where <strong>Slack becomes the browser and the command line for the enterprise,"</strong> he says.</p> <p>Slack has already integrated many enterprise apps into this chat-base service. So, it’s possible we’ll be sending reports and receiving analytics through one command line on one screen.</p> <p>The only issue that’s <strong>standing in the way is human language</strong>. Bots still have a <a href="https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/bots-are-better-without-conversation-fcf9e7634fc4#.x7tx5e6mr">tough time understanding conversational language</a>, which is why many chatbots employ either button-based choice responses or have their own command language. </p> <p>However, <strong>artificial intelligence and neural networks may help improve a system’s language</strong> to the point where it can answer basic, frequently asked questions, says Noah Weiss, Slack’s head of search:</p> <p>"Workers spend about 20 percent of their time looking for information, or looking for a person who has the information they need," <a href="http://www.recode.net/2016/6/6/11863534/slack-artificial-intelligence-AI-noah-weiss">Weiss told Recode</a>. "And we've found that a lot of the questions people have are asked over and over again."</p> <p>In time, though, Slack hopes one day it’s app will be able to predict your role in a company, automate tasks you do everyday, and eventually become something like an assistant.</p>
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