2023-07-01 13:02:27
Cybersecurity experts have developed an artificial intelligence system to answer the calls of these scammers and waste their time by prolonging the chat for as long as possible.
At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is being used for phone scams, cybersecurity experts want to thwart the plans of these scammers using the same technology. A team from Macquarie University in Australia, has developed an AI system that creates convincing fake victims in the form of multilingual chatbots. Objective: to waste time for scammers in order to reduce the amount lost by victims each year because of them, i.e. 55 billion dollars.
Wasting scammers time
Called Apate – following the Greek goddess of deception – this system aims to rip off crooks. Executive director of the university’s cybersecurity center, Dali Kaafar had the idea to develop it following receiving a fraudulent call while having lunch with his family. He managed to keep the scammer online for 40 minutes while making his kids laugh. “I realized that while I had wasted the scammer’s time so he mightn’t reach the vulnerable, which was the point – it was also 40 minutes of my own life that I would never recover”he explained.
Dali Kaafar then started thinking regarding a way to automate this process and“use natural language processing to develop a computerized chatbot that might have a believable conversation with the scammer”. The team began by analyzing the scam phone calls and identifying the social engineering techniques used by the scammers on their victims, using machine learning techniques and natural language processing.
Redirect fraudulent calls to chatbots
Chatbots were then trained on a dataset of real-world fraudulent conversations (fraudulent call recordings, fraudulent email transcripts, etc.) to be able to generate their own scam-like conversations. telephone. “The conversational AI bots we’ve developed can trick scammers into thinking they’re talking to viable scam victims, so they spend time trying to scam the bots”said Dali Kaafar.
These chatbots are currently being tested on live fraudulent calls, redirecting calls from victims to the system developed by the experts. The team put the numbers of these chatbots on the Internet, by introducing them into spam applications or even by publishing them on Web pages, in order to increase the chances that they receive these fraudulent calls. At the moment, chatbots manage to keep scammers online for an average of five minutes. The goal is for them to manage to do this for 40 minutes.
Seeking to deploy this technology globally, the team is currently in discussions with several telecommunications providers. “Partnering with communications providers will be key to making this truly effective”said the executive director of the university’s cybersecurity center.
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