This Chatbot Gives Phone Call Scammers a Taste of Their Own Medicine
A group of cybersecurity experts in Australia are developing a chatbot that can impersonate a human and sit on a scam phone call to waste a fraudster's time.
Researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney are creating the chatbot system to act as a “honeypot” that lures scammers into 40-minute-long conversations that amount to nothing.
“Our model ties them up, wastes their time, and reduces the number of successful scams,” says(Opens in a new window) Macquarie University professor Dali Kaafar. “We can disrupt their business model and make it much harder for them to make money."
The project started after Kaafar received a spam call and kept the scammer on the line for 40 minutes while entertaining his kids at lunch. Others have done the same, which can include pranking(Opens in a new window) the caller. But even though it can be fun or gratifying to turn the tables on a scammer, doing so takes time.
“Then I started thinking about how we could automate the whole process and use Natural Language Processing to develop a computerized chatbot that could have a believable conversation with the scammer," says Kaafar.
The result is Apate(Opens in a new window), a chatbot named after the Greek goddess of deceit. It essentially takes ChatGPT-style technology and pairs it with voice cloning to create a dummy human designed to hold long and convincing conversations with a scammer. Kaafar’s team has been training Apate on transcripts of real-world scam conversations, including phone calls, emails, and social media messages, so the bot can generate human-like responses when it answers a scam call.
According to the university, the team has been testing Apate on real scam calls through a prototype, which can assume a wide range of
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