419 eater is a site dedicated to exactly that. The general idea is to act totally clueless about everything. They want a scan of your passport? Request instructions on how to use a scanner and do everything wrong. Some people take this a lot further and get scammers on "safari" - a long and expensive trip where the scammer believes they'll be meeting their victim but instead just waste their time and money.

There's a couple legendary ones on there where the guys have gotten the Nigerians to ship heavy boxes over to USA/UK/Canada and cost them hundreds of dollars in postal fees

There's one where they (possibly) managed to kill the scammer. Or at least convinced him to rent a car and drive to a war-torn muslim-majority country and carry a note into a bank that said, in arabic, "mohammed rapes underage dogs". There was a This American Life about it.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/363/e...

That was genuinely upsetting listening to how desperate the scammer was getting. These guys, sure, steal money. But... That's cruel and unusual, for any person.

A bit much, maybe?

Probably. That was certainly the tone the interviewer took in that radio show. That was my first time I've seen someone do something "for the lulz" and then be confronted by a rational adult and asked to discuss the consequences of their actions.

That's why the memory of the episode stayed with me for so long- that show is from 2008.

Way too much, definitely

I love when he manages to get a scammer to produce an artwork and mail it.

One of my favourites: http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm

In the same fashion as knodi123, I would laugh a real lot about John Boko if I didn't suspect that the scammer delegated the realization and the costs to a very poor relative.

You may be right. The hope, of course, is there's some form of natural justice achieved in wasting significant amounts of the scammer's time.

There's one where they are convinced to reenact the Dead Parrot Sketch which is quite something:

https://youtu.be/YM5QMKLjjm8

They're actually not too bad at acting

This is a perfect use case for the current state of "AI" messengers. Auto-reply to spam emails and drag out conversations.

Free app idea for those wanting to start a small machine-learning project.

This is actually a call for research from YC-funded OpenAI:

> Spam the Spammers

> Investigate the use of language models to remove the profit from spamming.

> Spammers generate a huge amount of undesirable traffic and attention. Their emails are merely annoying for most people, but a small fraction of users fall into their trap. Spammers receive responses from users extremely infrequently. Therefore, they manually reply to each email.

> The task is to build a bot that automatically replies to spam emails. Such a bot shouldn't be easy to detect, which could be achieved by use of a powerful language model.

https://openai.com/requests-for-research/#spam-spammers

Could be an extension from Graham's A Plan for Spam, which basically called for a DDoS on spam servers:

> As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serious pounding. The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. This isn't just amusing; it would be hard to imagine a more perfectly targeted counterattack on spammers.

> So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html

Considering that a lot of spam is sent via botnets, it would not take much for spammers to either protect themselves by hosting their pages on botnets, or use it to cause others to run a DDOS for them.

This is a DDOS of the humans, not their computers.

I was responding to the Paul Graham quote:

> So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.

EDIT: But note that the problem is the same if you reply to the e-mails. If this is automated and enough people do it, then sending spam with fake from addresses becomes an effective way of attacking peoples mail accounts. I've seen this happen first hand by a spammer that used incendiary content to trigger manual responses by sending out what claimed to be an ad for child porn sent in the name of an anti-spam activist. It was scarily effective, even though in this case it required getting people to take manual action (in this case bad enough that he needed police protection as a result of a range of credible threats)

Why is it a call for research? A simple n-gram model would be enough. It only needs to be almost grammatical, the spammers can't read all the messages anyways, if they want to fight that they need another machine classifier.

> Why is it a call for research?

I assume it's their catch-all term for things that they don't expect to be profitable as a business.

I think for this to work, they will have to make something that can pass the Turing test, at least for a certain period of time.

Anyone that thinks scammers won't generate their own version of the Voight-Kampff test and it won't quickly spread is likely to be disappointed.

Can the AI get away with imperfect grammar and sentence construction to signal that it is a less educated human? You'll be fighting fire with fire.

An interesting area of linguistics and natural language research: creating an AI that makes the same mistakes as a human.

This is discussed in Brian Christian's The Most Human Human (a book about participating in a Turing test contest); there was a chatbot that claimed to be a young person from another country and made a lot of mistakes. People found it pretty convincing and forgave some of its linguistic comprehension errors because they had a plausible explanation for why it wouldn't be good at English.

Sounds like "Eugene Goostman". It's common to "cheat" on the Turing test by pretending to be an incomprehensible human, like "PARRY" which "simulated" a paranoid schizophrenic, about which Daniel Dennett relates this anecdote in his essay "Can Machines Think?":

"My favorite commentary on it was Joseph Weizenbaum’s; in a letter to the Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (Weizenbaum, 1974, p. 543), he said that, inspired by Colby, he has designed an even better program, which passed the same test. His also had the virtue of being a very inexpensive program, in these times of tight money. In fact you didn’t even need a computer for it. All you needed was an electric typewriter. His program modeled infant autism. And the transcripts--you type in your questions, and the thing just sits there and hums--cannot be distinguished by experts from transcripts of real conversations with infantile autistic patients."

It's well worth a read!

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/...

Eugene Goostman is exactly right -- and apparently genuinely fooled people.

Thanks for the reference.

Edit: It's very interesting and Dennett anticipates a number of Christian's observations, even in the part of the paper written before Dennett was associated with the Loebner contest.

Lenny is apparently quite effective against telemarketers:

http://toao.net/595-lenny

I highly recommend this site:

http://scamorama.com/

It provides hours of entertainment. The idea is to impersonate a famous person, and see how long you can string the "lads" along. I spent three months a few years ago replying as Jed Clampett, complete with an email address from "BankofBeverlyHills.com". I actually got the scammer to run an EXE I had written, to "transfer" my money into his account. It FTP'ed me the number of his account in a Honk Kong bank.

One genius, who said he was a surrounded by "rabid smurfs", got the scammer to stand in an airport, greeting a planeload of passengers arriving from Helsinki with the pre-agreed upon sign saying "Otan Poskeen", which means "I'll blow you" in Finnish.

When's the last time you laughed until you had tears in your eyes?

http://www.scamorama.com/smurf.html

419 scammers tricked into re-enacting monty python dead parrot sketch: http://boingboing.net/2007/02/20/419-scammers-tricked.html

419 scammers tricked into hand writing and scanning an entire harry potter book: https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/16/scambaiting-at-its-finest-...

This was a common proposal to fight spam in the bad old days. Have clients autodownload the graphics, click on all the links, and reply. That would drive their hosting costs through the roof (100x more traffic) and shift the economics of spamming. It didn't work because doing that would confirm your email was real and would increase your spam in the short term. For scammers this might not be as big an issue

Another flaw might be if I wanted to attack nonspamminghost.com I would just need to send out spam in their name with links to their site and let antispam measurements do my dirty work for me.

Back when I ran an e-mail provider, we had this kind of thing regularly. Worst one, though, was when some spammer faked spam in the name of a guy that had previously tried to track him down, with a message advertising child porn with the anti-spam activists name and address. The guy needed police protection and his mailbox overflowed with threats.

It was a pretty stark reminder that you can rarely trust the source of an e-mail, and any counter-measure against suspected spammers needs to be weighed very carefully, because it will be used as a tool to attack adversaries.

Including anyone the spammers perceive as trying to attack them.

Let's all remember Blue Frog, the tool that was so effective at stopping spam that spammers killed it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog

I had no idea spamming was such a big business for people to go to such lengths. Thanks for sharing :)

What's interesting is that they seem willing to engage with email "cold calls". My spam filter caught one of these on my primary email addresses once. I took the sender's email address, and replied from one of my throw-away accounts and the person on the other end picked up the conversation as-if I'd been an original recipient of his message. So a comprehensive database of sending addresses, fed into a system that produces automated replies, seems like an effective way to disrupt the entire scheme.

There are groups that do this. Although their goal is usually to humiliate the scammer.

I can only imagine that's where the "I AM SERIOUS NOW" image came from.

Y'know, the one with the dude hanging a laptop from his penis, holding candles and straddling two plastic garden chairs.

Groups? I did hear that TED talk but I didn't realize it was an ongoing effort.

Link?

Its hilarious that they got the scammers to hold up the hand written titles of each section of their website ...

Letters page: http://www.419eater.com/html/letters.htm

Hall of shame: http://www.419eater.com/html/hall_of_shame.htm

Trophy room: http://forum.419eater.com/forum/album.php

Usually referred to as "scam baiting".

> from each of us

And therein, of course, lies the problem with this solution and the reason it will unfortunately not succeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action#Collective_a...

I'd put some cash into a Mechanical Turk-esque initiative.