5 ms·

Well done. It does get the spammers frustrated. I remember reading about a similar thing[1] where instead of emails it was automated telephone replies and the s

Well done. It does get the spammers frustrated. I remember reading about a similar thing[1] where instead of emails it was automated telephone replies and the scammers were cussing at the bots and generally super confused. It did also manage to flood their phone lines making their call center useless for a while. [1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8wg4/we-talked-to-the-hacker-who-flooded-alleged-irs-scammers-with-robocalls https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8wg4/we-talked-...

jdietrich 9y ago
Some magnificent genius has created the perfect bot for hooking predatory telemarketers. "Lenny" is a slightly confused elderly man with poor hearing. He wanders off topic, he isn't sure what you just said and he is absolute catnip for crooks. If you haven't heard a call to Lenny, you're in for an absolute treat. This call from a tech support scammer lasts an exhausting 31 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJTxkPLVxrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJTxkPLVxrc https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/ https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/
- Tempest1981 9y ago
  Very well done. And the ducks -- hilarious! Now how do you scale and vary this enough, to prevent suspicion? That's the next step. Near the end (28 min), it felt like the caller was probing with "can you hear me" to collect Lenny's canned responses. Would it be better to hang up earlier to avoid suspicion?
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    "Lenny" is only 21 short recordings, stitched together into a crude sequence. It's a remarkably unsophisticated trick on a technical level. It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget. Tweak the script a bit, get someone on Fiverr to record it and you've got a new and unrecognisable Lenny MkII.
    - LV-426 9y ago
      Lenny being 'just' a bunch of unchanging messages in unchanging order made it all the funnier and more amazing to me (and it was completely brilliant before I realised). I remember first seeing it a while ago, posted here, ironically (or perhaps naturally) in a thread about Spamnasty (also excellent).
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      This sounds like something you could reasonably crowdfund, while delivering a really useful product.
    - masswerk 9y ago
      Maybe, rather than investing more into Lenny, create some more personas (voice, gender, etc) to add to the variety between calls? Maybe also have an option to hand a call over to the next persona in lengthy calls (so that the caller has to start all over again, in order to explain the issue to the "room mate", "brother", "cousin", etc)...
      - tzakrajs 9y ago
        This is brilliant.
        masswerk 9y ago
        "Oh, yes ... Oh, so late ... so late, already ... Listen, you have been so friendly with me, but I really have to feed the ducklings. It's well ... beyond their hour ... May I hand you over to my wife, Gertrude? She is such a nice person and knows these things better than me ..."
    - topspin 9y ago
      Somehow, somewhere Lenny has gotten connected to Lenny, detecting mutual silences and muttering at each other for years.
    - psandersen 9y ago
      I'd love to see it as an app with a blacklist for spam numbers or telemarketers. Use a better text generation engine like a modern deep learning based generative model, and deep voice or crowd-sourced recordings.
  - esaym 9y ago
    The ducks/geese had me rolling! Love it!
- bshep 9y ago
  i had a lenny bot running on my home phone line for a bit, i had an asterisk server with a whitelist ( i only get land calls from 2-3 numbers ) and recorded some hilarious calls, i even have a few from the church of scientology ( the prior owner of the number apparently was a member) and from bill collectors ( and she also owed a bunch of medical bills )
- masswerk 9y ago
  This is great! Instead of trying to be smart, Lenny capitalizes on prejudices about elderlies and possible communication factors regarding non-native call center operatives. It's more social engineering than a conversational bot. – Well done.
- DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
  Jolly Rogers is keeping marketer calls busy in a loop. hilarious stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424031
- joering2 9y ago
  On my list "todo" for 2018 -- ThisIsBenny.com -- website with bunch of buttons every one of them different phrase so when marketer is calling you, you can put on speakerphone and "lenny" them yourself :)
- dspillett 9y ago
  The thing that makes me angry with some of those recordings is when the callers still think that they are talking to a dotty old fellow who they can con (they usually cotton on to the trick in the end). When to my ears Lenny sounds like someone with dementia who needs help and should not under any circumstances be sold to without a legal guardian present, what they seem to take from the situation is "great, I might make my who day's quota on this daft old coot". At that point "but it is my job" really doesn't cut it.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    I think this is a crucial aspect of Lenny's design. If the bot was just an asshole, you might gain some sympathy for the telemarketers. Their torment at the hands of Lenny feels entirely fair, because it's obvious that he is not fit to be making financial decisions. The more unscrupulous the caller, the longer they stay on the phone with Lenny; it's an elegant self-regulating mechanism.
  - sporkologist 9y ago
    If they didn't try to get the sale, they'd probably get fired and swapped with someone who would.
    - hutzlibu 9y ago
      ... said the guard at Auschwitz and other places, as well.
    - Kadin 9y ago
      The capitalist's Nuremberg defense?
    - drdeca 9y ago
      The less supply there is of people willing to do it (at each given price I guess), the more the pay would have to be to hire people? So, I think, changing the population willingness to do it would change the profitability of it somewhat, perhaps slightly changing how much it gets done? I'm not sure.
    - 9y ago
- muzani 9y ago
  This is quite easy to make into a phone app too, seeing how apps can intercept calls. Combine it with a phone number database like Whoscall, and one can get beautiful results.
  - mvindahl 9y ago
    An even more beautiful idea would be if you could let your phone provider run the bot. Just press the magic button and the spam caller gets transferred to the upside down in the phone company data center, and your phone line is freed again (like hanging up, from your point of view). If he gets mad and calls back, Lenny picks up the phone. I don't know how billing works between phone companies but maybe your phone company could even make a profit from keeping spammers bouncing around in virtual Lennyworld. Which would be a nice incentive to do R&D on improving and diversifying the bots.
- golfer 9y ago
  This is incredible. I want an automated Lenny feature for all telemarketers that call me.. I get around 5 a day, this would be amazing.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  Wow. Does it count as passing the Turing test, or the scammers don't count as experts? Come to think of it, the scammers themselves would fail the Turing test.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    I think the Turing Test is usually described as an examiner is freely conversing with two subjects. The examiner knows that one subject is human and the other is AI. They are supposed to determine which is human and which is AI. If they can't achieve higher than 50% accuracy then the AI is deemed to have passed the Turing test. It would be a much easier version of the test if the AI only has to fool the examiner in a limited set of circumstances such as a scammer trying to qualify people as potential scam targets with a minimum of effort.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  "Candid Camera" did this long ago. They'd simply prepared a tape, with generic responses in it with gaps of silence. Then the salesman would grow increasingly frustrated with it, which of course was the source of the hilarity.
heyalexej 9y ago
A technique described in this podcast[1] may lock up quite some time with these people. [1]http://pca.st/yWw5 http://pca.st/yWw5
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jdietrich 9y ago

Some magnificent genius has created the perfect bot for hooking predatory telemarketers. "Lenny" is a slightly confused elderly man with poor hearing. He wanders off topic, he isn't sure what you just said and he is absolute catnip for crooks. If you haven't heard a call to Lenny, you're in for an absolute treat. This call from a tech support scammer lasts an exhausting 31 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJTxkPLVxrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJTxkPLVxrc https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/ https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

Tempest1981 9y ago
Very well done. And the ducks -- hilarious! Now how do you scale and vary this enough, to prevent suspicion? That's the next step. Near the end (28 min), it felt like the caller was probing with "can you hear me" to collect Lenny's canned responses. Would it be better to hang up earlier to avoid suspicion?
- jdietrich 9y ago
  "Lenny" is only 21 short recordings, stitched together into a crude sequence. It's a remarkably unsophisticated trick on a technical level. It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget. Tweak the script a bit, get someone on Fiverr to record it and you've got a new and unrecognisable Lenny MkII.
  - LV-426 9y ago
    Lenny being 'just' a bunch of unchanging messages in unchanging order made it all the funnier and more amazing to me (and it was completely brilliant before I realised). I remember first seeing it a while ago, posted here, ironically (or perhaps naturally) in a thread about Spamnasty (also excellent).
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    This sounds like something you could reasonably crowdfund, while delivering a really useful product.
  - masswerk 9y ago
    Maybe, rather than investing more into Lenny, create some more personas (voice, gender, etc) to add to the variety between calls? Maybe also have an option to hand a call over to the next persona in lengthy calls (so that the caller has to start all over again, in order to explain the issue to the "room mate", "brother", "cousin", etc)...
    - tzakrajs 9y ago
      This is brilliant.
      - masswerk 9y ago
        "Oh, yes ... Oh, so late ... so late, already ... Listen, you have been so friendly with me, but I really have to feed the ducklings. It's well ... beyond their hour ... May I hand you over to my wife, Gertrude? She is such a nice person and knows these things better than me ..."
  - topspin 9y ago
    Somehow, somewhere Lenny has gotten connected to Lenny, detecting mutual silences and muttering at each other for years.
  - psandersen 9y ago
    I'd love to see it as an app with a blacklist for spam numbers or telemarketers. Use a better text generation engine like a modern deep learning based generative model, and deep voice or crowd-sourced recordings.
- esaym 9y ago
  The ducks/geese had me rolling! Love it!
bshep 9y ago
i had a lenny bot running on my home phone line for a bit, i had an asterisk server with a whitelist ( i only get land calls from 2-3 numbers ) and recorded some hilarious calls, i even have a few from the church of scientology ( the prior owner of the number apparently was a member) and from bill collectors ( and she also owed a bunch of medical bills )
masswerk 9y ago
This is great! Instead of trying to be smart, Lenny capitalizes on prejudices about elderlies and possible communication factors regarding non-native call center operatives. It's more social engineering than a conversational bot. – Well done.
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
Jolly Rogers is keeping marketer calls busy in a loop. hilarious stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424031
joering2 9y ago
On my list "todo" for 2018 -- ThisIsBenny.com -- website with bunch of buttons every one of them different phrase so when marketer is calling you, you can put on speakerphone and "lenny" them yourself :)
dspillett 9y ago
The thing that makes me angry with some of those recordings is when the callers still think that they are talking to a dotty old fellow who they can con (they usually cotton on to the trick in the end). When to my ears Lenny sounds like someone with dementia who needs help and should not under any circumstances be sold to without a legal guardian present, what they seem to take from the situation is "great, I might make my who day's quota on this daft old coot". At that point "but it is my job" really doesn't cut it.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  I think this is a crucial aspect of Lenny's design. If the bot was just an asshole, you might gain some sympathy for the telemarketers. Their torment at the hands of Lenny feels entirely fair, because it's obvious that he is not fit to be making financial decisions. The more unscrupulous the caller, the longer they stay on the phone with Lenny; it's an elegant self-regulating mechanism.
- sporkologist 9y ago
  If they didn't try to get the sale, they'd probably get fired and swapped with someone who would.
  - hutzlibu 9y ago
    ... said the guard at Auschwitz and other places, as well.
  - Kadin 9y ago
    The capitalist's Nuremberg defense?
  - drdeca 9y ago
    The less supply there is of people willing to do it (at each given price I guess), the more the pay would have to be to hire people? So, I think, changing the population willingness to do it would change the profitability of it somewhat, perhaps slightly changing how much it gets done? I'm not sure.
  - 9y ago
muzani 9y ago
This is quite easy to make into a phone app too, seeing how apps can intercept calls. Combine it with a phone number database like Whoscall, and one can get beautiful results.
- mvindahl 9y ago
  An even more beautiful idea would be if you could let your phone provider run the bot. Just press the magic button and the spam caller gets transferred to the upside down in the phone company data center, and your phone line is freed again (like hanging up, from your point of view). If he gets mad and calls back, Lenny picks up the phone. I don't know how billing works between phone companies but maybe your phone company could even make a profit from keeping spammers bouncing around in virtual Lennyworld. Which would be a nice incentive to do R&D on improving and diversifying the bots.
golfer 9y ago
This is incredible. I want an automated Lenny feature for all telemarketers that call me.. I get around 5 a day, this would be amazing.
vadimberman 9y ago
Wow. Does it count as passing the Turing test, or the scammers don't count as experts? Come to think of it, the scammers themselves would fail the Turing test.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  I think the Turing Test is usually described as an examiner is freely conversing with two subjects. The examiner knows that one subject is human and the other is AI. They are supposed to determine which is human and which is AI. If they can't achieve higher than 50% accuracy then the AI is deemed to have passed the Turing test. It would be a much easier version of the test if the AI only has to fool the examiner in a limited set of circumstances such as a scammer trying to qualify people as potential scam targets with a minimum of effort.
WalterBright 9y ago
"Candid Camera" did this long ago. They'd simply prepared a tape, with generic responses in it with gaps of silence. Then the salesman would grow increasingly frustrated with it, which of course was the source of the hilarity.

heyalexej 9y ago

A technique described in this podcast[1] may lock up quite some time with these people. [1]http://pca.st/yWw5 http://pca.st/yWw5

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]