As Netsafe rightly says, "scamming email" is a billion dollar industry with millions of victims. Surely you will have received seductive emails, regulated by bots that encourage you to reveal something about you, perhaps your home address or phone number, pressing you with requests and encouragement of various offers.
In reality it is an algorithm on the other side wich answers and urges you to send yet another email. Just to combat this phenomenon, the New Zealand company Netsafe has prepared Re: scam, a service that is part of the fight against the scam designed simply to waste time on phishing systems like the one just described, pretending to be a victim.
Re: scam is therefore a chatbot that works via email. To activate it, just forward any phishing email to [email protected] and through a proxy email address the bot will start responding to the phishing algorithm for you, making them waste a lot of time. More details on Re: scam and a first demonstration can be found on the official website.
Netsafe has made a video to promote its anti-scam service. On the other hand is not the first exponent of the category: especially overseas has become very famous Lenny, a chatbot time-waster designed for telephone advertising. Lenny does not use any component of speech recognition or artificial intelligence, but only 16 fragments of prerecorded dialogues, all very vague and the most ambiguous possible. Lenny waits for a gap in the conversation and then launches one of her lines of dialogue.