A team of cybersecurity experts from a Sydney university has devised a brilliant way to combat annoying and harmful scam calls. They’re using AI technology to scam the scammers.
Phone scams are a huge problem worldwide, with people losing billions yearly. Scammers use cheap technology to hide their locations and make it look like they’re calling from a local number.
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Now, the new system, Apate (named after the Greek goddess of deception), uses artificial intelligence to create lifelike chatbots to scam scammers. These chatbots sound like real people and can hold long, convincing conversations with scammers. The goal? To waste the scammers’ time so they can’t target real victims.
Professor Dali Kaafar told The Guardian that the idea for this tool hit him during a family picnic. He received a scam call while on a family picnic, so to entertain his kids, he kept the scammer on the line with silly conversation. This gave him an idea: why not automate this process with AI? He and his team at Sydney’s Macquarie University’s cybersecurity Hub got to work, and Apate was born.
How It Works
As Professor Kaafar explained, when scammers call and think they’ve reached a potential victim, they talk to "Malcolm," an elderly man with an English accent, or "Ibrahim," a polite man with an Egyptian accent. But Malcolm and Ibrahim aren’t real people — they are AI chatbots designed by Professor Kaafar and his team.
These chatbots use advanced technology to understand and respond to the scammers, keeping them on the line for as long as possible. The longer the chatbots can keep the scammers talking, the less time they have to call real people and steal their money.
Thanks to a grant from the Office of National Intelligence, hundreds of thousands of these so-called victim chatbots are potentially available to telecoms in Australia. The A$720,000 grant is a drop in the bucket compared to the A$3.1 billion lost to scammers in 2022 alone.
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Making A Difference
Since December 2020, Australian telecommunications companies have blocked 1.9 billion scam calls. Since July 2022, they have blocked over 533 million scam SMS messages.
Now, with the help of Apate, there are countless AI "victim chatbots" ready to take on the scammers. These chatbots come with various accents, personalities, and responses, making them even more convincing.
Not only do these chatbots keep scammers busy, but they also compile important information by analyzing the scam calls. This information helps banks, retailers, and government bodies warn people about the latest scams.
Professor Kaafar says, "We’ve put these ‘dirty’ numbers all around the internet, getting them into some spam apps, or publishing them on webpages and so on, to make them more likely to receive scam calls."
His team now sees that the bots react well to tricky situations they weren’t expecting to get away with. When scammers ask for information that they didn’t train the bots for, they’re adapting and coming up with very believable answers.
They’re already averaging five minutes on the phone call, but the aim is to get them to 40 minutes. The Professor explains, "The bots are continually learning how to drag the calls out to meet their primary objective: keeping scammers on the line longer."
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