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Dev Teaches Bot to Talk Spammers' Ears Off

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday September 27 2016, @11:44PM   
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?]

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Original Submission

• Re:From the classic anti-spam plan checklist Re:From the classic anti-spam plan checklist (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.

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• Re:From the classic anti-spam plan checklist (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.

  Parent