SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Brian Weinreich has been trolling spammers for two years using a bot that fires realistic and ridiculous replies to the pervasive online salespeople.
He simply forwards unwanted emails to a specific address and the bot takes over. Offering the spammers open ended questions that they fall over themselves to answer.
My favourite bit from Brian's blog is "after the first month, I didn't have to feed the Looper any more. People were just spamming it on their own.". The spammers were selling on the list of "bitters" to other spammers.
The code is on GitHub
[editor's note: we covered a somewhat similar story here. Does this one have the same ethical implications?]
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Dev Teaches Bot to Talk Spammers' Ears Off
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 34 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 28 2016, @12:34AM
(Sadly, the lameness filter won't allow me to post the whole checklist, so just read it yourself [craphound.com])
Your post advocates a vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kell on Wednesday September 28 2016, @01:00AM
I'm not convinced that this could not scale. If you had enough honeypots, you could reduce the SNR for spam replies and make spamming uneconomical. While it gets close to "Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists", in fact, because it's providing false positives and not just a sinkhole, it actively reduces the one limited resource available to spammers (ie. their time).
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @03:43AM
What about when the spammers start using bots. Now a spammer bot can get into a long discussion with anti-spammer bots. The problem will just scale both ways.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @09:43AM
If bots were good enough to talk suckers out of their money, spammers would already be using bots.
Spamming the spammers with fake questions from fake suckers sounds like it would indeed work to harm spammers' fraudulent business.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Wednesday September 28 2016, @07:39AM
Worse. You could just go with technically impossible and idiotic, which is true. It requires the actual expenditure of time and resources on behalf of the spam operators to even make a difference at all, and that's highly dubious. Accepting to addresses from outside sources would be ludicrous and irresponsible, and the git code looks like something to operate a honeypot. Amusingly this would just get you on the IP blacklists yourself and blocked from legitimate servers. The word for the traffic it generates is called Back Scatter, and it's bad [wikipedia.org].
Most emails are not seeking direct engagement as their goal, but to deliver malware, or surreptitiously seek information with phishing scams instead. Unless it's very specifically the Nigerian scammer type email where there is an actual human being waiting for the reply, this is spam itself the majority of the time its operating.
Besides, it's an art form that is rarely appreciated. I think of it as desperate African soap opera that is also interactive. Some people don't appreciate theater.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.