Technology gives us new words pretty much every day. When “scambait” crossed my desk recently I thought it most apt and useful. After all, who among us hasn’t been the recipient of a scam phone call?
Many of us have even tried to play along with scammers. Attempts to fool phone scammers usually end in either a quick cutoff or a barrage of expletives. Seldom can the call recipient claim a victory in a phone scam.
The new term, scambaiting, describes baiting the scammer.
I’ve been writing about phone scams since 2011, when I first described the Microsoft scam. You know this one well. The caller says your computer has been detected as being virus-infected and is in need of remedial action. Typically the scam involves either a payment for meaningless service or the installation of keylogger software that can be used later to harvest valuable information, perhaps banking and other credentials.
I’ve taken countless such calls in the intervening dozen years. I can even claim a small victory of sorts. One day I received such a call only to find that I was actually in a lines-crossed call where someone else was being scammed. I could hear the scam in progress, and both the scammer and the other party could hear me. It was clear the scam was about to become profitable. The other party was bringing out her credit card. I called out: “Don’t pay! It’s a scam. Put away the credit card.” The scammer became incensed and unleashed a torrent of well-honed expletives, enough to stop the scam in its tracks.
For me at least, the Microsoft scam has mostly disappeared. It’s been months since I have had such a call. However, the Amazon-credit card scams continue unabated. Sometimes these mimic local calling area numbers, but much of the time they appear to originate from California or Quebec.
Most of you reading this will laugh off these sorts of scams. Unfortunately they remain lucrative. There are enough potential victims to keep them running, particularly in countries with growing populations of seniors. Hopefully those of you with aging parents regularly warn them about the scams prevalent at the time.
So, what about “scambaiting?” Well, it seems with artificial intelligence researchers can create believable chatbots that can keep scammers on the line while information about them is collected, if possible. These chatbots are baiting the scammers.
We should be careful about the actual callers involved in many of these phone scams. It may feel good to yell or launch verbal epithets at them but they may be working in some form of repressive servitude for major scam gangs.
Enter an AI-powered chatbot and software created by researchers in Australia. They have named their package Apate, in recognition of the Greek goddess of deception. Rather than having the chatbot deployed by users such as you or me, researchers are working with telephone service providers to use Apate at gateways, essentially hoping to correctly identify scam callers before the call ever reaches an end user.
Apate begins engaging with the scammers, keeping them busy as intelligence is gathered on them. With machine learning, Apate adapts to the scammers, modifying its actions as it intuits what is working and what isn’t.
Ultimately the hope is systems like Apate cause enough havoc to disrupt the business model driving these types of scams. Unfortunately scams have real victims and the scope of an individual case can run from a few hundreds of dollars to life savings in their entirety.
Here’s hoping for a time when we are free of phone-based scams.
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