…and steal their time from them instead! I get a lot of scammers trying to get my info or trying to give me LOTS of money. Yeah, sure thing about that last bit – all they want is your bank account info. Well, somebody with a quirky sense of humor has a great way to get back at all those “Nigerian Princes”:
WASTE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: Somebody wrote an email bot to waste scammers’ time.
Introducing Re:scam – an artificially intelligent email bot made to reply to scam emails. Re:scam wastes scammers time with a never-ending series of questions and anecdotes so that scammers have less time to pursue real people.
If you think you’ve received a scam email, forward it to me@rescam.org and we’ll take it from there. We’ll even send you a summary of the conversations Re:scam has had with the scammer – sometimes they can be quite funny!
I am going to try this just to see what the transcripts say.
BTW, I also get those Pakistani / Indian scammers that call saying that they are from “Tech Support” and are getting alerts that something is wrong with my computer. Generally, I ask “well, thank you but which one of my computers is the one that is sick – I have several?”. The pat answer is “the one that is on” which I follow up with “er, they are ALL on – is it one of the Windows machines, one of the Macs, one of the iPads, or the Androids?” which generally throws them into a tizzy. It isn’t quite as effective now as it once was but it does give me a chance to toy with them for a while and waste their time because when they try to get “technical”, I go techie on them. Eventually, however, they catch on, realize they’ve been had, and I get the now obligatory “F U” at which time I laugh like a hyena before the line goes dead.
Yet, they keep calling back. TMEW, if she answers, just tells them she doesn’t own a computer – and that starts another whole line of time wasting Q & As. Sometimes ya just gotta take the good when you can get it.
Heh!
(H/T: Boing Boing via Instapundit)