The Scambot: Defeating Online Scammers with Automated Chatterbots

Hardly a day goes by without some online scam artist emailing me, usually with the standard Nigerian or 419 scam. You know, the ones that start with “Dear friend, I am an officer at a bank/government leader in exile/international merchant” and go on to outline why they need help retrieving some vast sum of money.

In the past, I have successfully wasted large amounts of these scammers’ time simply for amusement. Conceivably, if everybody were to do this, the amount of time the scammers would spend dealing with people who are just stringing them along might make the scam an unprofitable use of their time.

However, this would be far too time-consuming, especially since the scammers can send out thousands of emails at the click of a button.

That’s where the use of automated chatterbots come in. A chatterbot is a “computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods”.

Basically, it’s a program that is designed to respond to things you say as though it is a human being. You can try one out by going here and clicking the “Chat with Alice” link on the left.

These programs are not very convincing when you know what you’re dealing with, but when someone is convinced they are chatting with another human being, the person can sometimes be fooled, often with hilarious results – for example, horny people trying to strike up sexual conversations in online chat rooms (warning, graphic content).

My idea is to apply this concept to scammers. A program to deal with scammers could be created that would work something like this:

1. You receive an email from an online scammer. You forward this to another email address that belongs to the anti-scammer chatterbot (I’ll call this program the scambot from now on.)
2. The scambot would receive the email and scan it for relevant keywords. (The scambot would already be set up to generally deal in subjects related to finances, bank accounts, retrieval of funds, etc.)
3. The scambot prepares an email response and sends it to the scammer, thus initiating an email conversation with the scammer. Since the email will be coming from the scambot’s own email address, no further user action is required. However, the scambot will maintain a record of emails in thread format, allowing the user to step in and drop in some more convincing emails if the user wishes.

I believe that the scambot could waste large amounts of time for scammers for several reasons. First, many of these scammers speak English as a second language, so they are not as likely to pick up on cues in the scambot’s responses as a native English speaker.

Second, it would be possible to use social engineering techniques in the scambot’s initial responses that would help overcome the skepticism of the scammer. For example, the scambot could also pose as someone who speaks English as a second language, or as someone who is somewhat addled (e.g. an elderly person with a touch of dementia but a ton of money).

Finally, greed is a powerful motivator.

[tags]scams, 419, chatterbots, artificial intelligence[/tags]