Wired: Apate uses about 350,000 SI bots posing as victims to keep scammers busy
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
SI doesn't only work for scammers: decoy "victim" bots eat their time and collect data for investigations.
According to Wired (its Kernel Panic newsletter), the Australian company Apate has spent two years building a system that diverts phone scammers' calls to SI bots trained to keep a conversation going as long as possible without falling for the scam. According to founder and CEO Dali Kaafar, banks use the platform with the support of telecom companies, and it has about 350,000 bots; they pick up calls, infiltrate scammers' chats and answer text messages. The company, by his account, has gathered more than 250,000 pieces of information about scammers in real time — from website addresses to money-mule accounts and bank details — and calls often run longer than two hours. Wired's authors tested a demo version: the bots were responsive and the pauses looked natural, and they could not get "Lucy" to invest in cryptocurrency in six minutes. The figures come from the company's founder; the authors note that even with such a swarm of bots, new scam calls will keep coming.
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