'Do you do a bingo night?': the New Zealand chatbots designed to scam the scammers

Thu 9 Nov 2017 20.44 EST Last modified on Thu 9 Nov 2017 21.05 EST Thousands of online scammers around the globe are being fooled by artificial intelligence bots posing as New Zealanders and created by the country's internet watchdog to protect it from "phishing" scams. Chatbots that use distinct New Zealand slang such as "aye" have been deployed by Netsafe in a bid to engage scammers in protracted email exchanges that waste their time, gather intelligence and lure them away from actual victims. Computer programmers at Netsafe spent more than a year designing the bots as part of their Re:scam initiative, which went live on Wednesday. Within 24 hours 6,000 scam emails had been sent to the Re:scam email address and there were 1000 active conversations taking place between scammers and chatbots. So far, the longest exchange between a scammer and a chatbot pretending to be a New Zealander was 20 emails long.