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Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time
- vitiral 2y agoIt's the year 2035. 80% of all energy is consumed by AI scammers talking on the phone with AI Grammas.
- christophilus 2y agoThis may be the best use case for AI yet.
- mkrishnan 2y ago[dead]
- ynoxinul 2y agoReminded me of Lenny and he didn't even need any AI to waste a lot of scammers' time.
- deadlast2 2y agoMaybe Daisy has become sentient and has taken over all operations at 02. No one noticed.
- AlwaysRock 2y agoI remember setting up Lenny and forwarding calls I used to get to him while commuting on the bus early in my career. It was a lot of fun to listen to scammers start to freak out when they realized what was happening.
- overcast 2y agoOur record at the office was 47 minutes. FORTY SEVEN MINUTES keeping a scammer on the phone till they hung up. We never laughed so much at work in all of twenty years. :D
- Scarjit 2y agoI can already see AI scammers phoning AI anti-scam agents.
- pants2 2y agoAIs talking to AIs... at the end of the day the real winner is always Nvidia
- optimalsolver 2y agoNvidia should change their brand logo to a shovel.
- random3 2y agoSo we should all be relieved now because scammers can't train and deploy AI models but old people will surely adopt them.
- Veen 2y agoHaving dealt with O2's support line, I wouldn't be surprised to discover they'd deployed a time-wasting AI there too.
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoOf course, the scammers have created their own AI to call people and scam them so it's just playing catchup. It's like corporate avatars for hiring or cold call bots for sales. I'd say stick to white listed numbers, but pro phones can't do that, and they are the most prone to spam.
- jalk 2y agoSo some time in the future, the Telcos will report, that 30%-50% of calls are Scammer AIs talking to Granny AIs
- klabb3 2y agoGreat, the dead internet theory is being backported to landlines.
- gorkish 2y agoI always ask the robocalls to say something specific. It finally worked the other day! A robot repeated "chrysanthemum" back to me when asked. Sadly it seemed to be limited to this one single trick; as I continued my attempts to exploit it, it abruptly apologized and ended the call. Cute, but one day I am going to get lucky and a scammer is going to get absolutely wrecked.
- 2y ago
- jonplackett 2y agoI wish they would have a number I can cal to speak to her. That would be fun
- scoot 2y agoI was thinking the same, but so that I can conf-call unknown or obviously suspect numbers to it, and listen to the hilarity unfold in real-time.
- vundercind 2y agoI could try to walk it through fixing its network settings in Windows 98. Really re-live my telecom tech support days.
- jonplackett 2y agoI could relive my teenage years where my grand dad would call up 2 x per week so I could help him set the clock on his microwave.
- lupusreal 2y agoSurprised there aren't any comments whining about this because the scammers are bigger victims. Usually there's at least one.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> surprised there aren't any comments whining about this This is called a totem. You’ve invented or learned a caricature to rail at which may have once been based in truth, and from time to time again approximates it, though never with the fidelity you ascribe to the original. It’s commonly done by sides in partisan polarisation, the most common being a two-mode system that pillories its picture of the other. If you picture the person writing the totem comment, you probably have a clear idea of what they do for a living, how they dress, et cetera. Totems are why both deification and demonisation work; they’re a hack of the human ability to visualise and project.
- lupusreal 2y agoNah, check the archive. I have no idea how they dress, nice "totem" though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043630
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoThis is doubling down on “may have once been based in truth, and from time to time again approximates it.” Analogy: phantom pain is pain in a limb that was once there but now isn’t. The limb was real. It probably felt pain. But when a patient imagines pain after the limb is gone, that’s the diagnosis. Those comments are real. The people, probably, too. Responding to them when they aren’t in the room is a separate matter.
- lupusreal 2y agoYou have this notion of a visualization gimmick and have visualized me using it (ironic). In fact my game is far simpler; blithly preempt and thereby insult anybody who subscribes to a belief I consider to be misguided. For all I know they look just like me, it makes no difference.
- AnthonBerg 2y agoWho Timewastes the Timewaster?
- dmurray 2y agoThis is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy". When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy". And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't do that because they prefer to collect a few cents a call from them rather than serve their customers better. It's everyone else who needs this.
- waiwai933 2y agoThey're not intercepting calls over their network from suspected bad actors; rather, they've created some phone numbers that always go to Daisy - see https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/11/virgin-media-o2-uk-creates-ai-granny-to-waste-scammers-time.html https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/11/virgin-media-o...
- axus 2y agoAh! So step 2 is wait for the spammers to automate blacklisting of Daisy phone numbers, and only then start rolling out a (paid) Daisy option to customers. Not connecting calls doesn't waste spammer money, but maybe Daisy does. If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.
- ttul 2y agoMy friend works for a big telco and is the guy fixing this problem for them. They have amazing powers of deception when they need it. New numbers can be conjured up at any time.
- simfree 2y agoThe new fad among wireless carriers here in the US is to route what they think are spam calls to a fake voicemail box. Voicemail that is left in this generic voice mail box never makes it to their customer and the customer is completely unaware that some of their calls have been diverted.
- LlamaTrauma 2y agoInstating an AI model as "Head of Scammer Relations" is hilarious. I think the point here is to collect the phone numbers of scam call centers and have Daisy call them so that scammers waste time talking to it rather than a victim.
- scoot 2y agoI was a little surprise to read that they're using speech-to-text and text-to-speech rather than an end-to-end speech model. Won't that horrible latency? (I guess the old-person persona disguises it a little...)
- seabass-labrax 2y agoI'm imagining this is just a publicity stunt, and I'll say it's a very good one. However I can't see it being very practical. There are lots of scam calls to keep up with and LLMs and text-to-speech models are expensive to run. If they do run this in production, the costs of running hundreds of 'Daisies' will inevitably be passed onto the consumer, and worse still, if the scammers are calling in through PSTN lines or cellular this will use up our already scarce bandwidth. I've frequently had difficulty connecting through trunk lines from Belgium and Germany to numbers in Britain, and that's without a legion of AI grannies sitting on the phone!
- huac 2y agoreal-time full duplex like OpenAI GPT-4o is pretty expensive. cascaded approaches (usually about 800ms - 1 second delay) are slower and worse, but very very cheap. when I built this a year ago, I estimated the LLM + TTS + other serving costs to be less than the Twilio costs.
- jackphilson 2y agowhich is why we need to adopt nuclear power so we run thousands of these so the odds of them picking up a bot instead of a person is overwhelmingly likely
- wepple 2y agoEvery type of defensive tech is nothing more than driving up the cost of attack. Doubling the dwell time for a scammer will halve their profits. That could have interesting second-order effects. Perhaps it makes it not worth it for some subset?
- xanderlewis 2y agoWeird how she doesn’t sound like an old lady. Just hearing the voice, she sounds about 45.
- xnx 2y agoSeems like the logical endpoint of a lot of this is people getting paid directly for their attention. Want to call me? I've set a price of $5/call that I answer, and an additional $10/minute of listen time after the first 10 seconds. Want to send me an email? $1/email and $5/100 words. Anyone I have emailed is automatically on my allow-list, which I can also adjust manually.
- wzsddtc 2y agoI think you have just described LinkedIn's business model, minus the fact that you don't get the money but the filter provider does.
- xnx 2y agoYes. There are all kind or brokers selling the attention of their audiences: Google, TV Networks, podcasts, LinkedIn, etc. I'd like to see another attempt at disintermediation in the space.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoAnd maybe like a temporary hold of the money, so you get it back if I’m convinced it’s not spam. Probably would resolve 99% of spam issues in the real world and create a chain of trust. Add some temporary disabling feature as well if you’re expecting a call from a random number too, so you’re set.
- swores 2y agoSounds like a great solution to the minority of people like you and me who wouldn't mind the added steps of approving every real phone call as not spam after, having to remember how to set that you're expecting a call from a random number, etc. I can't see it being acceptable to enough people for any network to go down this road unless spam levels get way worse.
- toss1 2y agoSpam is already at the level of changing people's default behavior from answering calls that come in to (as I saw described abt younger mobile users) "would rather pick up a live hand grenade than an unknown caller" Personally, my default was to pick up and is now if recognized contact pickup, if not and I'm expecting an unknown call, scrutinize, then if pickup, only answer with a cough or two — never "hello" or "yes" due to threat of voice cloning escalate to banks. Spam is universally detested My assessment is that voice calls are on the verge of going obsolete if the telcos fail to get a handle on spam. Yet the telcos behave as if they have no clue whatsoever and DGAF.
- watusername 2y agoIf you use a VoIP service like Twilio and voip.ms, you can set up a very simple IVR menu that just asks unknown callers to press 1 to be connected to you. No AI involved. For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls. Obviously this isn’t going to work against scammers who call directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some pre-recorded message which isn’t going to pass the menu. Edit: s/auto/pre
- morkalork 2y agoIf they ever get clever enough to automate the menu selection, it would be funny to have an infinitely deep IVR sort of like the tar pits people build on websites to trap web crawlers.
- thfuran 2y agoI think I've gotten exactly one spam call since I set up an IVR like that a few years ago, and it was probably not quite daily before that.
- Ronnie76er 2y agoMy Pixel 8 (not sure what other Android phones do this) can screen calls using their AI assistant. It asks what the call is about. If they answer, it displays the text to you as it rings through. It sounds surprisingly human-like, even saying "Hello?" in a slightly annoyed tone when the other person doesn't respond in time.
- cedws 2y agoVery nice to see, my grandmother was recently scammed out of a large amount of money. Luckily the bank reimbursed her. Scammers are a stain on the reputation of India. You could argue it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same brush, but quite clearly rule of law isn't properly functioning over there and there's complicity in letting them do this. Same goes for Nigeria.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Pikamander2 2y agoI'd imagine India will gradually crack down on it more over time. The tech industry there is growing massive and they surely aren't happy about being associated with scammers.
- primitivesuave 2y agoThey won't. The companies that operate these scam centers are diversified criminal enterprises run by ultra-wealthy and politically connected individuals. These people own the police, they own the politicians, and until fairly recently, they owned the voters through massive vote-buying schemes. You can get away with murder in India if you're wealthy enough (e.g. the case of Jessica Lal, murdered by a politician's son in front of at least a dozen witnesses). The egregious corruption of the INC or "Congress party" (which is ideologically progressive) over many decades has created a massive voter exodus to the conservative BJP party, the majority party in India since 2014. However, the corruption and inefficiency at all levels of civil society has remained endemic.
- pnut 2y agoI just googled Jessica Lal and the Wikipedia article suggests that the rich murderer was convicted and sentenced to life in prison? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jessica_Lal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jessica_Lal
- jusonchan81 2y agoI wonder when will the scammer also create an AI scammer. Joke aside, is this going to be cost effective? What would it cost to keep a scammer on the phone for an hour? Who will pay this bill?
- SubiculumCode 2y agoSo, scammers start using these things too (obviously), and so AI will be trying to scam AI, then they'll be like "we need to detect when our bots are talking to a bot, so they can exit the call sooner." GANWAR
- sangnoir 2y agoRemember: O2 gets paid for incoming international calls by the minute
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pityJuke 2y agoIf Jim Browning is involved, it might not be terrible. Let’s see.
- yesthisiswes 2y agoMy father setup his own solution for robocalls. If the phone rings more than three times it kicks the call to the fax machine. Apparently fax lines are supposed to be kept clear because of legal reasons? All I know is half the time I call I get a dialup sound as my call gets routed to the fax machine.
- milleramp 2y agoJolly Roger has been doing this for a while, the example phone calls are hilarious. https://youtube.com/@jollyrogertelephone?si=sB3Tiql0wsUlXldo https://youtube.com/@jollyrogertelephone?si=sB3Tiql0wsUlXldo
- markgoho 2y agoyes!
- outside1234 2y agoOr we could just make these calls illegal?
- Tepix 2y agoRight. These scam calls are not a god-given problem. Some countries do not have them in any significant amount. I suspect there is greed involved (political or corporate) that prevents this problem from getting solved.
- notahacker 2y agoThey are. Sometimes people continue to do things even though they're illegal
- Tepix 2y agoWell then make it easy to catch the perpetrators.
- alexjplant 2y agoSo it's just an AI re-implementation of the Telecrapper 2000 [1]? The original site is down but there are plenty of YouTube videos [2] of it still available. [1] https://hackaday.com/2005/09/08/telecrapper-2000/ https://hackaday.com/2005/09/08/telecrapper-2000/ [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK_zHisT_A https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK_zHisT_A
- bityard 2y agoThat's pretty hilarious. Amazing what you can do with just a well-crafted pre-recorded script. There are some other Youtube videos where a guy writes these ChatGPT personalities, but those aren't as entertaining because the AI is basically just blurting out random thoughts rather than engaging in an actual conversation.
- darkr 2y agoGreat PR move, but surely better to invest in more basic security measures supported by their app (chain of trust, verified callers/messaging etc). Instead their app is primarily a react native sales tool. Part of the reason that o2 was so affected by scammers calling from south Asian call centres with “the latest offers” was because they used to do exactly this with their customers.
- ddtaylor 2y agoTo be clear while I don't enjoy the idea of receiving low-effort sales calls, I do think that real scammers are different. Real scammers don't have a business, aren't willing to go to court, etc.
- pointy_hat 2y agoImagine a day when a scam bot will talk to AI granny.
- ddtaylor 2y agoI love that they are weaponizing the perceived kindness of senior citizens in this way. Many of the victims of scams are some of the nicest people ever that were taken advantage of in some capacity - usually while trying to help someone. It's the digital age equivalent of staging a broken down cart and then robbing some old folks. I think most of us hate the idea of the "solution" being to not go near anyone with a broken down cart out of fear. I'm not saying this fixes everything, but I would rather a world where scammers odds at making a living at this are so poor they won't bother versus a world where everyone has to block every number by default and live in metaphorical bunkers to never interact because you might be a scammer.
- e-khadem 2y ago> I would rather a world where scammers odds at making a living at this are so poor they won't bother Then what's stopping the scammers from finding another "evil" job that makes money? You have to remember that humans tend to not enjoy accomplishing thievery and the scammers most often do this out of necessity. Of course there are big call center operators who truly are terrible people, but this conclusion is true for the bulk of their workforce.
- CarpaDorada 2y agoThe big call center operators usually have political backing too.
- botanical76 2y agoWhat is your suggestion? It seems like you could discourage any form of preventative action against immoral behaviour this way. There is _always_ something worse than the problem at hand.
- ddtaylor 2y agoIt's a very common way of justifying poor behavior or criminal activity. It's basically "if they didn't sell the drugs someone else would" or "if they didnt steal someone else would" etc.
- aantix 2y agoWhat's the best API for real-time conversations? Strangely, I looked at OpenAI's offering. Despite it being crazy expensive, they also didn't offer a reference implementation anywhere close to the functionality that is demo'ed in the regular ChatGPT app. Nobody seems to get the interruptions correct - people are doing all sorts of weak workarounds like push-to-talk, etc.
- jliptzin 2y agoSeems stupid to publicly announce this product so that scammers are now aware of it? Also what happens when scammers start using AIs of their own to do the scamming?
- notahacker 2y agoIf scammers are wondering if a confused little old lady who's the first person to listen to them all day is actually an AI programmed to be nice that's... probably not a bad thing
- Archelaos 2y agoWait until the scammers become AIs too. Thinking of a world where phone conversations between humans is the exception ...
- mcbuilder 2y agoOther controversies aside, this could end up being a bit of a organic Turing test, if the AI ever becomes convincing to enough scammers.
- Archelaos 2y agoWondering when an AI passes the HN Turin test. -- Or has it already happened?
- staticshock 2y agoScammers can jam this by reporting legitimate phone numbers as scam numbers, no?
- brap 2y agoThis reminds me of “shadow banning” - instead of letting the misbehaving user know they’ve been banned, and let them find a way around it, you make them believe they’re not banned and let them waste their time interacting with the system (without actually interacting with others), this makes them spend less time on actual misuse and it makes the penalty for it more expensive. Good strategy. Cruel too. So I don’t think that this is just entertaining PR, I can see why it’s better than simply banning the scammers. Still a question of cost though.
- bityard 2y agoNo doubt it has been misused at some point or another, but shadow banning in the context of online communities is generally a last-resort defense against the very worst and most prolific trolls. Not someone who accidentally breaks forum etiquette one time. A person who is shadow banned generally continues their antisocial behavior in the face of multiple warnings and reprimands. I don't see it as cruel. I see it as defending the community against those who get pleasure out of trying to wreck it. It's effective because the bannee is generally too dim to realize what has happened to them until they get bored and go away.
- throwaway313374 2y agoIs it effective at all though? It's very easy to check if your posts are available by browsing them anonymously or under a second account.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoIn regular communities, maybe, but that kind of abuse is rampant on platforms : I was shadowbanned on Reddit as a new user, and still regularly get shadowbanned in YouTube comments (seemingly if I dare to post more than one comment, or if I dare to add a link, including a timelink to the very video!)
- optimalsolver 2y agoThe next step up is "heaven banning": https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561 https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoGood on them! > and one in five (22%) experiencing a fraud attempt every single week That seems low. I guess they mean phone calls only. I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day (and these are the ones that made it past the first line defense). I also get 10 or more scam texts. Some of the phising emails that I get, are frighteningly realistic (but invariably seem to have at least one speling eror in them). If folks live in a normal suburban development, they are highly unlikely to get several hundred crooks, knocking on their door, every day, but being on the Internet, means exactly that. The crooks only need to land you once, you have to have a perfect record, avoiding them.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago> I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day I've seen no legit spam e-mail in years, on my very old, very used, "forums and other logins I don't care about", 2005 gmail address. What provider are you using?
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agomac.com. I have an OG address that was registered about five minutes after Steve introduced the service. Network Solutions sold it to spammers, and the rest is history. Also, a couple other of my emails (and phone numbers) are associated with businesses, so are sort of public record (not really, but everyone finds out, anyway).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rickcarlino 2y agoThis reminds me of Dead Internet Theory. We have a phone network of AI scammers endlessly calling AI counter scammers. What a time to be alive.
- gorkish 2y agoBoy howdy, wait until you hear how rural phone companies make money. There is one simple and easy solution to this mess, but good luck getting traction on it.
- codezero 2y agoThis is great but almost certainly a game of whackamole as scammers will use AI until they obtain some identifiable action like a bank transfer or PIN code.
- JSDevOps 2y agoThey would be better sorting themselves out first rather than working on this nonsense
- JasserInicide 2y agoIf this is just a PR stunt, imagine what they're cooking up behind the scenes: AI reps to answer actual customer calls. No more paying a horde of $10/hr meat slaves in some call center! You know some execs creamed themselves over this already.
- froglets 2y agoHave you been to an AI drive through yet?
- stewx 2y agoLenny was the OG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM
- luispa 2y agohoneAI pot
- tomcam 2y agoThe "Daisy" AI sounds exactly like a female version of Bill Nighy.
- kelvinjps10 2y agoActually the google phone as some spam blocking additional to the one in my carrier which is crap, I was using the samsung app and I was getting spam calls always, I set up google one , now I get none
- bsdice 2y agoThe scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this day. And has been for 10 years. A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable. It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as number@t-mobile.de for example, while a spam call would say fakenumber@01012.com. Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away. It works great to this day, because I never published it.
- Ocha 2y agoScreen unknown callers to VM. Solved all my problems
- SoftTalker 2y agoI simply don’t answer calls that aren’t in my contacts.
- ycombinator_acc 2y agoVM? Virtual machine?
- mcntsh 2y agoWow the HN crowd is younger than I thought. Voicemail
- scudsworth 2y agocant even stand to watch (or listen to) more than 5 seconds of the obviously generated granny. i doubt even the audio will be convincing enough.
- owenpalmer 2y agoWait till the AI scammers start calling
- bayareacommie 2y ago[dead]
- burger_moon 2y agoI applied for a mortgage today through my bank. Before the automated “next steps” email could hit my inbox my phone was already ringing and ringing and ringing. About 10 minutes straight of automated spam callers that are watching who knows what public ledger on now. I guess it pretty much means retiring this number next year. I’ve inly had the number a little over a year and the spam has slowly crept up despite best efforts to give fake numbers where possible.
- Pikamander2 2y agoWe accidentally registered a domain once without the privacy setting enabled and proceeded to get dozens of spam/scam calls about it over the next few months.
- Scoundreller 2y agoDo registrars verify the numbers? Might put the number of someone I don’t like first; then flip the privacy setting and fix the number
- pnw 2y agoI see a large number of spam emails with the "fake invoice" scam, and I've often thought an AI powered voice bot could really waste the time of the scammers call center and save some senior citizens money and grief. Has anyone developed an open source equivalent?
- danslacker 2y ago[flagged]
- ryandrake 2y agoWhenever I go home to visit my elderly parents, I'm amazed at how many scam calls they get. Like at least 4 or 5 an hour. And they pick up each one because they're from a time when you simply pick up your phone when it rings, and they won't change their habits. It's long past time that phone calls should stop being synchronous and immediate. They are only this way because historic landlines were synchronous and immediate, and nobody changed it. This functionality should be culturally unacceptable in 2024. Imagine if the concept of a land line never existed. Then, a startup came out with an app that: 1. allowed random people to cause your handheld device to stop what it was doing and immediately ring and vibrate and pop up a dialog over whatever app was active, 2. when you pushed a button, an instant two way audio channel was initiated, and 3. they could do all this without any authentication whatsoever--just needing to know a non-secret 10 digit number. This kind of app would fail every App Store guideline, and it would be laughed out of the ecosystem as unacceptable to end users. But in reality, it's "The Phone App" that comes pre-installed on your damn phone!! Insane that this kind of application is acceptable.
- ortusdux 2y agoI really enjoy the Google Pixel exclusive call screener. https://youtu.be/V2IyttWHJfs?si=mreFXk6h-yDAJ3D7&t=50 https://youtu.be/V2IyttWHJfs?si=mreFXk6h-yDAJ3D7&t=50 I've had a few friends get new numbers, and seeing "Hey it's your Aunt, I got a new phone" live transcribed on the screen has come in handy.
- aussieguy1234 2y agoThis goes to show how tech can be a double edged sword. Sure, AI is going to be abused by scammers, but in the never ending arms race its also going to be used against them.
- gsuuon 2y agoI default to never answering now. Every time I feel like it might be an actual person on the other end and risk answering, it has turned out to be a scammer or spam call. Not sure why governments don't do more against them - scam and spam callers have destroyed phone communication.
- James_K 2y agoSadly, many scam callers are actually slaves in Myanmar. Those unable to detect this may face physical punishments, or worse. Not that I'm supporting the practice of scamming, but this kind of scam prevention is also morally dubious.
- BillLucky 2y agoFight AI scams with AI assistants and just let them have the conversation themselves
- yamumsaho9292 2y ago[dead]
- hatmanstack 2y agoThis feels more like misery porn disguised as a crusade to 'protect' the vulnerable. I’m not suggesting we make it easier for people to get scammed, but intentionally engaging seems like a recipe for a harsher clap back. Education > Escalation.
- robust-cactus 2y agoAnother solution - drop numeric phone numbers all together and switch to alphanumeric or verified contact only. With numeric, sequential phone numbers you can just robocall all the numbers until you find a victim. Making the search space significantly larger should solve that attack vector. Of course, this will effectively be the same as transitioning from IPv4 to v6 - with all the same associated pain It'll help with so many things: - in contact syncing systems you can't rainbow table your way to decrypting numbers - numbers can be permanently burned once they're released or deemed as spam. This means every service could ban spammers safely without fear of burning a real user. - people could more easily have alt numbers, non-voip numbers for untrusted services.
- hannofcart 2y agoI don't think the scammers are using sequential iteration over numbers. I suppose it's more efficient to just call numbers exposed in a data breach. Your suggestion won't help circumvent that. I think.
- robust-cactus 2y agoFair, but you could throw away numbers more easily in this situation due to data breaches. You could also "update trusted parties" with a new improved scheme overall.
- jameson 2y ago"I got all the time in the world" I never felt that so literal and scary
- habosa 2y agoOr Virgin/O2 could, you know, just actually block the scammers.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoThis scratches an itch, sure, but the people manning the phones for a scammer are likely to be in a pretty desperate situation themselves. They may or may not be free to leave, etc. I'd like to find a way to help them roll over on their bosses and find their way to something more productive, rather than just making their bosses madder at them.
- kombookcha 2y ago>I'd like to find a way to help them roll over on their bosses They're unlikely to do this, because scam call centers are typically a branch of local organized crime syndicates. There is nowhere for them to roll, because their boss' boss also pays a bunch of crooked cops and whatnot. The bottom rung guys doing the actual calling aren't gangsters, but further up the organization they are, so attempting to fuck with the organization from the bottom will not end well for you if you live in that area and lack protection.
- ycombinator_acc 2y agoIsn't text-to-speech very expensive? Last time I checked, Eleven Labs, the most natural-sounding TTS provider, were charging insane amounts per token. Wasting so much on scammers sounds unsustainable and just silly.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoOr make every phone call cost a cent. .But then again therecis large growth potential in human hostile software abd services and defenses against that
- arethuza 2y agoWhat I find amusing is that scammers have my phone number but my wife's name - so I get random calls where they say "Can I speak to Ms Arethuza" and I say "No" and end the call.
- robertlagrant 2y agoKitBoga, scam baiter par excellence, did this in 2021[0]. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-56458267 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-56458267
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- neycoda 2y agoThat's great, but I can't tell who are fraudsters until after hearing what they say.
- flir 2y agoFollow-up idea, probably silly: Robogranny Olympics. Allow people to submit their own bots, Micromouse/koth.org/Battlecode-style. Bots are run on random phone numbers for several weeks, and are ranked on average call length (total time/num calls). The robot that can keep spammers on the line the longest wins the prize. A condition of submission is that the bot code and weights are published (not open sourced, just published). Competition is repeated yearly.
- silexia 2y agoIf spammers like this are in another country, their country should be cut off from the global phone and internet system or we should simply drop bombs on their call centers.
- methods21 2y agoAs long this doesn't put Kitboga out of business.
- sofsatitfu2017 2y ago[dead]