New AI Chatbot Intends To Outsmart Scammers And Waste Their Time

Tired of fraudsters who keep crowding your phone with sham calls? A group of cybersecurity experts in Australia are developing a chatbot that can impersonate a human and oversee a scam phone call in order to waste a fraudster's time.

The chatbot is being developed by researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney. It will act as a "honeypot" that lures scammers into 40-minute-long conversations that really lead to nothing. Essentially, the chatbot flips the switch on the fraudsters.

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How does the model work?

"Our model ties them up, wastes their time, and reduces the number of successful scams," says Macquarie University professor Dali Kaafar. "We can disrupt their business model and make it much harder for them to make money."

The project was birthed after Kaafar received a spam call and kept the scammer on the line for 40 minutes.

"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.

Also read: Google Bans Internal Use Of AI Chatbots, Including Its Own Bard: Report

The chatbot is called Apate, named after the Greek goddess of deceit. Using ChatGPT-like technology, it pairs it with voice cloning to generate a dummy human that is capable of sustaining long conversations to wade off the scammer.

The team has trained Apate through scam conversations through transcripts including phone calls, emails, and social media texts. Based on this, the bot is able to generate human-like responses while answering a scam call.

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Apate is being tested on scam calls through a prototype that is able to put on a variety of personalities. "We've put these ¡®dirty¡¯ numbers all around the internet, getting them into some spam apps, or publishing them on web pages and so on, to make them more likely to receive scam call," Kaafar says.

Also read: 'Jugalbandi' Chatbot Aimed At Rural India Backed By Microsoft Coming Soon

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The goal of this AI tool is to trick a scammer into a 40-minute conversation. Currently, it is able to manage average conservations for about 5 minutes. "We found the bots react pretty nicely to some tricky situations that we were not expecting to get away with, with scammers asking for information that we didn¡¯t train the bots for¡ªbut the bots are adapting, and coming up with very believable responses," Kaafar said.

What do you think about using a chatbot to stop scams? Let us know in the comments below. For more in the world of technology and science, keep reading Indiatimes.com.