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Dev Teaches Bot to Talk Spammers' Ears Off

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday September 27 2016, @11:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the sweet-sweet-honeypot dept.

rob_on_earth writes:

From the register

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?]

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Kell on Wednesday September 28 2016, @01:00AM

    by Kell (292) on Wednesday September 28 2016, @01:00AM (#407144)

    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).

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @03:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @03:43AM (#407175)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @09:43AM (#407300)

      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.