New Zealanders lose around NZ$250m annually to cyber crime. Re:scam was developed to help people from becoming fraud victims by occupying the time and resources of scammers through deploying a well-educated artificially intelligent chat bot.

Re:scam is an artificially intelligent email bot made to reply to scam emails. Re:scam wastes scammers time with a never-ending series of questions and anecdotes so that scammers have less time to pursue real people.

When someone forwarded a scam to me@rescam.org our chatbot adopted a character type and replied to the scammer based on the content of the scam email.

The bots replies were intended to lead scammers on for as long as possible.

Features

- Accurately identifies scam emails.
- Has multiple personalities with unique traits.
- Can generate fake postal addresses, credit card details and bank details.
- Makes typos and mimics human tendencies.
- Randomizes response times.
- Uses IBM Watson’s natural language understanding to analyse email content, learn keywords and determine responses.
- All data is shared with cyber crime agencies.

The Results

- +1 million emails sent to scammers.
- 5 years of scammers' time wasted.
- +279 million earned media impressions.