This is obviously funny, but I think the end result will be a bit sad. Spammers will (or already are) start to use similar AI programs to cold call people, then transfer to the scammer if they’ve got a live one. Eventually we’re just going to be heating the Earth so that invisible chatbots can have conversations no human will ever hear.
I’m just going to start not answering the phone unless it’s a number in my contacts. If it’s important they can leave me a message.
The scammers can spoof any number, including one of your contacts.
There are actually tools that can unmask spoofed calls and show the true number that a call originates from. I’ve never used them personally, but I worked in computer telephony years ago so I have an understanding of how these tools work.
Caller ID was created so that a company like a bank that might have 100 or more telephone lines could program them so they always show up as “1-555-ACME-BANK” if they wanted to. So it’s trivial to set Caller ID to whatever you want.
But there’s another identification baked into calls that goes way back to the days when long distance calls were expensive and charged by the minute. The telephone companies needed to ensure the calling number was passed along from one phone carrier to another for billing purposes, and since it involved collecting money you can be sure it was accurate and unchangeable. This is called Automatic Number Identification (ANI).
Typically ANI is only passed between phone companies, or over high capacity phone circuits like T-1 lines, so it’s not sent to the person receiving the call. But there’s a feature available to most mobile phone plans that, combined with ANI, can provide for a way to do just that.
Depending on your mobile provider there’s likely a way to forward calls you explicitly ignore to another number. This only happens when you click to ignore/disconnect the call, and not let it time out and go to voicemail. When you sign up with one of these unmasking services then you set up your phone to forward these calls to their service. Then, if you get a spoofed call or even one where the caller id says unknown or unavailable, you click to ignore it. The call gets rerouted to the unmasking service, which has access to the ANI data. It reads the ANI number, replaces the Caller ID data with the ANI, then immediately routes the call back to you again. This time it will show you the number the call originated from and would be billed to.
Thank you. I did not know this.
Ah least they would need to know it first.
I’ve always done that. If it’s not a contact, I let it go to voicemail. If it was actually important, they leave a message.
In this day and age, if it’s actually important they’ll probably immediately send you a text message/WhatsApp/etc. anyway.
It just dawned on me that I only ever get spam calls OR texts - never a call followed by a text. Seems like some form of success could be had with doing that.
Not that I want to give them any ideas – I assume they’ve already tried this and determined it wasn’t successful.
If you’re on Android, you can automate that with this app (available on F-Droid):
https://github.com/x13a/SilenceIt also includes options to allow numbers you’ve contacted by phone or text, even if they’re not in your contacts, e.g. the doctor’s office.
What has worked for me quite well over the last few years was answering the phone without saying anything. Spammers usually are dead silent as it’s just a voice recognition bot waiting for a “hello” or similar and hang up within a couple of seconds if nothing is said. Regular people have “static” most of the time. I’ve had a few recruiters call while having their mic on mute, but they start talking themselves fairly quickly.
Scammers already are using AI. In every awful way. Like using real-time face changers in video calls in pig butchering scams.
That’s the permanent arms race between attack and defense: Every time the defender comes up with a way to protect themselves, the attackers go find a new way to deal with that defense. Unless some superior force makes the attackers sit down and shut up, or the cost of attacking becomes greater than the return on investment.
But just think of the PROFIT to be made selling the AI before the world burns from it!
Sir, after the latest round of training to the new LLM it hallucinates all the time talking about nonsense that never happened, and every time you ask it any questions, It gets preoccupied with the first answer it comes up with and won’t take any more input.
Wait I have an idea…
“Daisy” is claimed to be indistinguishable from a real person, fooling scammers into thinking they’ve found perfect prey thanks to its ability to engage in “human-like” rambling chat, the biz claims.
lmao okay. This will work for maybe a week, and then they will smarten up
I’ve watched an 18 minute video of an Indian scammer talking to an answering machine randomly repeating one of like 10 pre-recorded voice lines. This one is most likely much better and will steal hours of their time.
Idk, elderly are prone to rambling on and sometimes not making much sense. Perfect use of AI if you ask me.
Lmao, you’ve never heard of Lennybot.
Scammers are stupider than you could ever imagine.
I’m not sure. Sometimes I feel like talking to my almost 80 year old mother is sorta like talking to chatGPT.
Lenny did this without AI over a decade ago.
Imagine explaining this headline into somebody in 1990.
Imagine explaining this headline to somebody in 1890!
Imagine explaining this headline to the very last somebody reading it in an old internet archive in a bunker in 2090!
somebody reading it in an old internet archive in a bunker in 2090
How very optimistic of you. I’ve been a little more despondent about our future. I doubt we’ll still exist as a species in 2090.
We’ll cling to life like cockroaches despite being so fragile.
Our wealth class has littered and is littering this Earth with climate controlled luxury bunkers to escape the consequences of their own fine work, which will buy some sad bastards the honor of sipping expensive whiskeys in concrete tombs below the scorched surface for a few decades before we finally, mercifully end.
It might be the family of the perpetrators we know like the Bezoses and Musks, but I can only dream it will be their service/security staff that will have murdered them the moment the security doors closed and took their shit.
I can imagine the ruling class to still have their pissing contests with other billionaires from their secure bunkers. Eventually they’ll develop bunker busting nukes and everyone will be gone.
It’s all so depressing. I know it’s not going to help but I need a drink.
Do it. You’ve earned a drink my friend.
Once again, one of the very rare few areas where ai isn’t a completely shitty solution: tasks that are worthwhile and important, but that require labor no one is willing to pay for.
Others include translation, transcription, and image descriptions. Things people won’t put resources into but that should happen anyway
The only problem is that these have nothing to do with why massive companies are investing in this tech. If AI didn’t enable the equivalent of money laundering for intellectual labor, the billionaires wouldn’t give a shit
The Grandma-Honeypot LOL
But I don’t believe in it. If I were the scammer, I would have maybe 2 or 3 of these lengthy talks with “her”, but afterwards I would recognize her and of course avoid her anytime.
Until they change the name and voice and have a whole fleet of elderly AI chatbots.
That “fleet” would need many significant differences, like when you recognize different people, then many features are different. If your grandma talks to you with a different tone, you would still recognize your grandma easily.
Depends on how much effort the average scammer puts into remembering the prospective victims that don’t bite. My guess is that they don’t waste too many brain cells on that.
Nah, u gotta remember that they call from loud call centers with a shitty headset. Not that easy to pick up details in the voice
Ok that’s actually pretty funny
