I have an idea. I can’t tell if it’s good or bad. Let me know what you guys think.
I think when someone posts “clone credit cards HMU for my telegram I know you’re just here sitting here waiting like gee I wish someone would post me criminal scammy get rich quick schemes, I can’t want to have a felony on my record” type spam, there should be a bot the mods can activate that will start sending messages to the person’s telegram or whatever, pretending to be interested in cloned credit cards.
It wouldn’t be that hard to make one that would send a little “probe” message to make sure it was a for-real scammer, and then if they respond positively, then absolutely flood them with thousands of interested responses. Make it more or less impossible for them to sort the genuine responses from the counter-spam, waste their time, make it not worth their while to come and fuck up our community. And if they lose their temper it can save some of the messages and post them to some sort of wall of victory.
What do people think?
Search around for “scambaiting”, there are people doing similar things ranging from tying up (figuratively, unfortunately) telephone scammers for hours with pointless conversations to more tech-based efforts. Kitboga on YouTube is a good place to start, he usually just sits on the phone with scammers and takes them through some wild scenarios but has some videos showing tests of an automated system that uses an LLM to interpret and respond.
I started doing this after my phone number got into some kind of crazy scam call database. At the height of it I was getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 calls a day, basically rendering the phone unusable.
So I started actually picking up and running these jokesters through the ringer. I’m talking 15+ minutes of pointless conversation, false info, tons of backtracking, and general bullshit. I refined my craft over a few months and would time how quickly I could make them scream at me for fucking with them. At the end of it my phone got taken off at least one of the bigger lists because the calls went to down only 10 or so a day. Now it’s one or two a day at the most, probably from me not answering like I used to.
Favorite call was one guy who figured out I was messing with him and it turned into this general question and answer thing about life in the US. Dude wanted to know how easy it was to pick up chicks and whether or not I’d dated a lot/was married. Great guy, really into Counter-Strike.
I am a big fan of Kitboga’s work.
kitboga’s AI thingymajig was hilarious. wastes so much time on the scammer’s end, and requires almost no effort on the user’s side.
My absolute favorite is the one where to redeem their money from the transfer agency, the scammers have to navigate through a labyrinthine phone tree maze that never leads anywhere. He releases them to wander their way through it and just keeps statistics on how long they spend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzz3NeDz3E
He ran into someone who had dealt with it before, and started talking about transferring money through this system and the guy started protesting and sounded so defeated. “Oh, it’s so easy,” he says, and the guy sounds just purely defeated and horrified as he says “No, no ma’am, I do not think it is easy…”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=dWzz3NeDz3E
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I fucking love kitboga. Such a guilty pleasure.
Kitboga on YouTube
Kitboga posts on YT, but he’s based on Twitch, where he goes live almost daily.
Hook it up with ChatGPT and you are golden!
I just immediately thought the same. No way would they be able to distinguish that from a real person.
You sure? If it’s another bot at the other end, yeah, but a real person, you recognize ChatGPT in 2 sentences.
You can preface a ChatGPT session with instructions on what length and verbosity you want as replies. Tell it to roleplay or speak in short text message like replies. Or hell, speak in haikus. It’s pretty clever for an LLM.
And if someone’s writing code to make a bot, they can privately coach the LLM before they start forwarding any replies between the real person.
If you train and condition the LLM, yeah. Out of the box, no.
No, you don’t need to train it, it’s just about the prompt you feed it. You can (and should) add quite a lot of instructions and context to your questions (prompts) to get the best out of it.
“Prompt engineer” is a job/skill for this reason.
I was going to disagree with you by using AI to generate my response, but the generated response was easily recognizable as non-human. You may be onto something lol
Yeah, I’ve noticed that too—there’s a distinct ‘AI vibe’ that comes through in the generated responses, even if it’s subtle.
That was a response I got from ChatGPT with the following prompt:
Please write a one sentence answer someone would write on a forum in a response to the following two posts:
post 1: “You sure? If it’s another bot at the other end, yeah, but a real person, you recognize ChatGPT in 2 sentences.”
post 2: “I was going to disagree with you by using AI to generate my response, but the generated response was easily recognizable as non-human. You may be onto something lol”It’s does indeed have an AI vibe, but I’ve seen scammers fall for more obvious pranks than this one, so I think it’d be good enough. I hope it fooled at least a minority of people for a second or made them do a double take.
Short replies and sentences is the way to go with LLMs. They get too polite if you leave them to their devices. It’s in their “nature”, they’re designed to please.
Nah, not really! I’ve chatted with people using ChatGPT, and most couldn’t tell. It’s pretty slick, blends in well with natural conversation.
Most… you’re talking about the average Joe. People that write spam bots are not your average Joe.
Plus, if you’re talking about a chat with multiple people, yes, it might stay under the radar. But 1 on 1, probably not.
Well, fair point about the spam bot creators, but in my experience, even in one-on-one chats, it holds up. I’ve had some pretty smooth conversations without anyone suspecting it’s AI.
Do you have some logs? Would like to have a look at that.
This conversation is a small example. My previous messages in this comment chain were generated by ChatGPT.
I’m too lazy to keep that up indefinitely, but at this point you can decide for yourself whether it was convincing enough.
there are youtubers who fight back against scammers, some who have been doing so for years. some of the best ones are also hackers, and have managed, through not only their own work, but with assistance from others, and over time and working with local authorities in India, have actually managed to take down more than a few scam centers. problem is, when you take one down, 5 more pop up.
still, they fight on
Yeah, I would use a bot like this on Telegram. Could hook it up to a tiny LLM (The Phi for example) and give it instructions to play along and then block after some time.
Next time you see a scammer, DM me a link and the details and I’ll see what I can do.
If you’ve thought of it, they’ve thought of it. Plainly, there are already scam bots floating around, most of the time engaging with them makes it quite clear that they are not actual people, as long as you’re paying attention. Their side oftentimes is completely automated. Get paid send info. The “lifelike” messages they send are canned and only vary slightly from message to message.
I swear, we’ll implement bots to “combat” this stuff and it won’t do anything because it will largely just be bots talking to bots forever. There’s already a nontrivial amount of internet bandwidth consumed by spam email that just gets thrown away as it arrives, now, more and more resources are going to be poured into having bots talk at eachother for centuries without getting anywhere.
It is a nice idea… but it involves some effort on this side to get that done, and I don’t think anyone would be interested. People on dbzer0, maybe, everyone else, I don’t think so.
I’m volunteering to be the one to put the code together.
OK. Write to DBzer0, see if he’ll be willing to host the bot.
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com Hey do you think this would be a good idea, a bot to waste scammers’ time (possibly with AI)?
Sure, why not. Unfortunately I have enough on my plate already. However this doesn’t need someone to host. Such a bot could easily run as a script on your PC.
Maybe write him a PM, I don’t think he reads posts that much, lol 😂. And just for the hosting, not coding the bot. He’s way too busy with AI Horde and other projects.
It was a mention, so I got a notification ;)
don’t underestimate basement dwellers, they have way too much time on their hands. if one is sufficiently serotoninized, they might actually do it.
They don’t have enough "jerk-off-to” (or whatever their social depravities) incentive might be.
Lemmy is not at that critical point yet.
