AI Is Getting Really Good at Messing With Cybercriminals

Anti-cybercrime initiatives are increasingly using AI to scam the scammers by tricking them into talking to lifelike bots that they think are real victims. Even as AI supercharges digital scamming and cybercrime, it's also being recruited in the fight to protect potential victims. Governments around the world have consistently struggled to address the global crisis of online crime, grappling with the limitations of attempting to crack down on criminals beyond their borders . This has inspired alternative efforts, like using automation to attempt to go after scammers en masse--perhaps by spamming the spammers to squander their resources. Now, AI platforms are turning these types of experiments into real tools in the fight against cybercrime. For the last two years, the Australian company Apate, named after the Greek goddess of deception, has been building a system that diverts phone scammers onto calls with AI bots that are trained to keep conversations going as long as possible without, of course, ever actually falling for the scam.