Making scammers pay – and suffer

There's a new way to deal with scam emails – and it doesn't involve the junk folder. New Zealand's online safety organisation, Netsafe, has launched Re:scam, a new chatbot designed to waste the time of online scammers. Netsafe describes the bot as, "the world's most inefficient and unhelpful chatbot," but assures users it only bothers the scammers. Re:scam is designed specifically for phishing emails, and works by using AI capabilities to assume multiple personas that engage with scammers in order to waste time that could be spent on potential victims. Making use of humour and grammatical errors, the bot aims to closely mimic human online tendencies in order to suck in cyber criminals into a never-ending conversation, while also collecting data that can be used to shut down the scams.