Technology

Kitboga is amazing

Fark (possibly Something Awful, it was forever ago). iirc, had a run of scamming the Nigerian Prince email farms. It was pretty savage, having humans send humiliating/degrading time stamped/dated photos via email, which in turn ended up on Fark. The first couple of stories seemed funny in a disturbing kind of way, and about the third or fourth column, I was really uncomfortable. Then I read about how these farms worked by trafficked human power.

Not the same thing, but an older site/service where they would just randomize various automated responses during gaps in the conversation to keep the person on the phone. They have a bunch of recordings.

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/our-robots/

https://aff.419eater.com/viewforum.php?f=29&sid=ba36f1c70b17dbbfaa5cc6315689443e

people have been scam baiting for ages. my favorite is the one where they got them to do the dead parrot sketch

kitboga made a bot that listens to what scammer says and responds with pre recorded voicelines automatically

Scammers have long since used bots already for text based scams (though dumb ones). Phone calls are a lot harder, though. And there's also "pig butchering" scams, which are the long cons. Most commonly those are fake relationships. I suspect those long cons would have a hard time convincing someone for months, as human scammers manage to do.

I suspect that scammers will have a harder time utilizing AI, though. For one thing, scammers are often not that technologically advanced. They can put together some basic scripts, but utilizing AI is difficult. They could use established AI, but it'd almost surely be against their ToS, so the AI will likely try to filter scam attempts out.

That said, it might be just a matter of time. Today, developing your own AI has a barrier to entry, but in the future, it is likely to get a lot easier. And with enough advancements, we could see AI being so good that fooling someone for months may be possible. Especially once AI gets good at generating video (long con scams usually do have scammers video chat their victims).

And honestly, most scams have a hundred red flags anyway. As long as the AI doesn't outright say something like "as a large language model...", you could probably convince a non zero number of victims (and maybe even if the AI fucks up like that -- I mean, somehow people get convinced the IRS takes app store gift cards, so clearly you don't have to be that convincing).

Robocalls