[HN Gopher] Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time
___________________________________________________________________
Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time
Author : ortusdux
Score : 412 points
Date : 2024-11-14 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.virginmediao2.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.virginmediao2.co.uk)
| christophilus wrote:
| This may be the best use case for AI yet.
| ynoxinul wrote:
| Reminded me of Lenny and he didn't even need any AI to waste a
| lot of scammers' time.
| deadlast2 wrote:
| Maybe Daisy has become sentient and has taken over all
| operations at 02. No one noticed.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I remember setting up Lenny and forwarding calls I used to get
| to him while commuting on the bus early in my career. It was a
| lot of fun to listen to scammers start to freak out when they
| realized what was happening.
| overcast wrote:
| Our record at the office was 47 minutes. FORTY SEVEN MINUTES
| keeping a scammer on the phone till they hung up. We never
| laughed so much at work in all of twenty years. :D
| Scarjit wrote:
| I can already see AI scammers phoning AI anti-scam agents.
| pants2 wrote:
| AIs talking to AIs... at the end of the day the real winner is
| always Nvidia
| random3 wrote:
| So we should all be relieved now because scammers can't train and
| deploy AI models but old people will surely adopt them.
| Veen wrote:
| Having dealt with O2's support line, I wouldn't be surprised to
| discover they'd deployed a time-wasting AI there too.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Of course, the scammers have created their own AI to call people
| and scam them so it's just playing catchup.
|
| It's like corporate avatars for hiring or cold call bots for
| sales.
|
| I'd say stick to white listed numbers, but pro phones can't do
| that, and they are the most prone to spam.
| jalk wrote:
| So some time in the future, the Telcos will report, that
| 30%-50% of calls are Scammer AIs talking to Granny AIs
| klabb3 wrote:
| Great, the dead internet theory is being backported to
| landlines.
| gorkish wrote:
| I always ask the robocalls to say something specific.
|
| It finally worked the other day! A robot repeated
| "chrysanthemum" back to me when asked. Sadly it seemed to be
| limited to this one single trick; as I continued my attempts to
| exploit it, it abruptly apologized and ended the call.
|
| Cute, but one day I am going to get lucky and a scammer is
| going to get absolutely wrecked.
| alphan0n wrote:
| Chrysanthemum is also my go to. That or "You're in a desert.
| You're walking along in the sand when all of a sudden.. you
| look down and see a tortoise.."
| jonplackett wrote:
| I wish they would have a number I can cal to speak to her. That
| would be fun
| scoot wrote:
| I was thinking the same, but so that I can conf-call unknown or
| obviously suspect numbers to it, and listen to the hilarity
| unfold in real-time.
| vundercind wrote:
| I could try to walk it through fixing its network settings in
| Windows 98. Really re-live my telecom tech support days.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Surprised there aren't any comments whining about this because
| the scammers are bigger victims. Usually there's at least one.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _surprised there aren 't any comments whining about this_
|
| This is called a totem.
|
| You've invented or learned a caricature to rail at which may
| have once been based in truth, and from time to time again
| approximates it, though never with the fidelity you ascribe to
| the original. It's commonly done by sides in partisan
| polarisation, the most common being a two-mode system that
| pillories its picture of the other.
|
| If you picture the person writing the totem comment, you
| probably have a clear idea of what they do for a living, how
| they dress, _et cetera_. Totems are why both deification and
| demonisation work; they're a hack of the human ability to
| visualise and project.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Nah, check the archive. I have no idea how they dress, nice
| "totem" though.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043630
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This is doubling down on "may have once been based in
| truth, and from time to time again approximates it."
|
| Analogy: phantom pain is pain in a limb that was once there
| but now isn't. The limb was real. It probably felt pain.
| But when a patient imagines pain after the limb is gone,
| that's the diagnosis.
|
| Those comments are real. The people, probably, too.
| Responding to them when they aren't in the room is a
| separate matter.
| lupusreal wrote:
| You have this notion of a visualization gimmick and have
| visualized me using it (ironic). In fact my game is far
| simpler; blithly preempt and thereby insult anybody who
| subscribes to a belief I consider to be misguided. For
| all I know they look just like me, it makes no
| difference.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _preempt and thereby insult anybody who subscribes to a
| belief I consider to be misguided_
|
| This is the totem. You react to a misguided belief even
| when it's a phantom.
|
| If you look at two-mode polarised discussions, you'll
| find both sides talking about a totem of the other,
| reacting to imagined preemptions and rarely interacting
| with each other. The graphs separate. As a result, the
| preemptions are more imagined than real. (Both in
| characterisation and frequency of emergence.
|
| Note that this is perfectly normal. Kids do it. And it's
| fun. It's also easy, since instead of reacting to
| anything empirical or well argued you're constructing
| straw men for the purpose of taking them down.
| lupusreal wrote:
| You have reiterated your position after I disputed it, a
| behavior which may be described as "doubling down". This
| term carries a negative connotation, and therefore proves
| the other person (myself) correct.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _have reiterated your position_
|
| I clarified my position. The visualisation isn't the
| totem _per se_. The representation is.
|
| > _term carries a negative connotation, and therefore
| proves the other person (myself) correct_
|
| Nobody said you were wrong. Correct, necessary and even
| germane are distinct.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Who Timewastes the Timewaster?
| dmurray wrote:
| This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as
| "Lemmy".
|
| When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is
| to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call
| I make gets answered by "Daisy".
|
| And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech?
| They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from
| the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't do
| that because they prefer to collect a few cents a call from them
| rather than serve their customers better. It's everyone else who
| needs this.
| waiwai933 wrote:
| They're not intercepting calls over their network from
| suspected bad actors; rather, they've created some phone
| numbers that always go to Daisy - see
| https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/11/virgin-media-o...
| axus wrote:
| Ah! So step 2 is wait for the spammers to automate
| blacklisting of Daisy phone numbers, and only then start
| rolling out a (paid) Daisy option to customers.
|
| Not connecting calls doesn't waste spammer money, but maybe
| Daisy does.
|
| If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad
| actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.
| ttul wrote:
| My friend works for a big telco and is the guy fixing this
| problem for them. They have amazing powers of deception
| when they need it. New numbers can be conjured up at any
| time.
| simfree wrote:
| The new fad among wireless carriers here in the US is to
| route what they think are spam calls to a fake voicemail
| box.
|
| Voicemail that is left in this generic voice mail box
| never makes it to their customer and the customer is
| completely unaware that some of their calls have been
| diverted.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Wow. There should be a way to opt out of this, at least.
| Isn't this a violation of common carrier laws?
| immibis wrote:
| Then suddenly, calls from consenting callers to
| consenting receivers are labeled as spam and blocked.
| What can you do about it? Nothing. Switch to email, I
| guess. Oh wait, same problem.
| kabdib wrote:
| reductio ad absurdum: we're back to Pony Express
| telgareith wrote:
| Simple: shoot the messenger.
| immibis wrote:
| I called out email because email actually has this
| problem. It's not reductio ad absurdum if it's true.
| connicpu wrote:
| Bulk scams by mail are at least less common because mail
| fraud is investigated pretty seriously and results in
| federal felony charges. Not to mention the cost of
| initiation is much higher. Unfortunately individuals are
| still sometimes targeted.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher_
|
| This is the thing we screwed up for email and phone
| (after per call fees dropped to zero).
|
| It's not rocket science to create systems that net to
| zero for common usage (balanced in-bound vs out-bound),
| but charge an arm and a leg for bulk senders.
| immibis wrote:
| Until you're running a file server or the equivalent.
| There has to be some way for a willing recipient to zero-
| rate or reverse-charge the responses to their requests.
| The Internet gets this wrong.
| plagiarist wrote:
| The physical mail spammers know to only use deceptive
| tricks, like "FINAL NOTICE" or pretending to be
| affiliated with you using some publicly available
| information. I have not yet seen one dare to full-on lie,
| because there would be real consequences.
|
| If a scammer puts "FINAL NOTICE" on a solicitation they
| mailed with no prior relationship, I do still report it
| as fraud. But that's probably wishful thinking.
| connicpu wrote:
| Not sure about all carriers, but on mine I still get a
| push notification when a call gets blocked blocked by the
| spam filter.
| neilalexander wrote:
| Better yet, route all calls for all
| disconnected/unassigned numbers in their part of the
| numbering plan to it. It would probably kill robocalling
| overnight.
| connicpu wrote:
| Who tells them the number is disconnected? That would
| have to come from the shady carrier enabling this stuff.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Then, once the spammers have blacklisted the Daisy numbers,
| cycle those spam-free numbers to their customers and start
| a new batch of Daisy numbers. This way, there is a constant
| flow of spammer free numbers being cycled into the pool. Of
| course, everyone and their dog wants your phone number, so
| you will have to be careful who you give it to if you want
| it to stay spam-free.
| ronsor wrote:
| > Then, once the spammers have blacklisted the Daisy
| numbers, cycle those spam-free numbers to their customers
| and start a new batch of Daisy numbers.
|
| This is actually genius. The spammers will have
| blacklisted all of their targets eventually.
| lhamil64 wrote:
| Until they catch on and un-blacklist the numbers
| periodically.
| Szpadel wrote:
| we all know the end game: ai scammer talking to ai granny
| flir wrote:
| As long as the scammer's paying to route the call, I'm ok
| with this. And the telcos' fitness function for their
| pool of robogrannies should be time-spent-on-call. Making
| it uneconomic is the way to kill it.
| knicholes wrote:
| Ah, so it's a honeypot.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Let's ignore the real problem and distract the plebs by
| building some cute AI tool instead.
| bn-l wrote:
| Would it help to know that
|
| > Influencer and reality TV star, Amy Hart, has worked with
| Daisy to produce a shocking video to show how she's taking on
| phoney fraudsters
| svachalek wrote:
| Wait, is a phoney fraudster an honest person?
| gorkish wrote:
| If every third call you make goes to Daisy you are using shit
| data and are likely part of the problem. Are you absolutely
| sure they are fucking up the spam detection, or are you just
| doing all of your cold calling with blinders on?
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| If you mean Lenny, I've got bad news for you. The gentleman who
| created Lenny was a fairly high up person at a telco, and
| continues to be.
| Lio wrote:
| I think you mean Lenny[1] not Lemmy. Although I think it would
| be incredibly funny to have scammers talking to the voice of
| Lemmy[2].
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy
| LlamaTrauma wrote:
| Instating an AI model as "Head of Scammer Relations" is
| hilarious. I think the point here is to collect the phone numbers
| of scam call centers and have Daisy call them so that scammers
| waste time talking to it rather than a victim.
| scoot wrote:
| I was a little surprise to read that they're using speech-to-text
| and text-to-speech rather than an end-to-end speech model. Won't
| that horrible latency? (I guess the old-person persona disguises
| it a little...)
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I'm imagining this is just a publicity stunt, and I'll say it's a
| very good one. However I can't see it being very practical. There
| are _lots_ of scam calls to keep up with and LLMs and text-to-
| speech models are expensive to run. If they do run this in
| production, the costs of running hundreds of 'Daisies' will
| inevitably be passed onto the consumer, and worse still, if the
| scammers are calling in through PSTN lines or cellular this will
| use up our already scarce bandwidth. I've frequently had
| difficulty connecting through trunk lines from Belgium and
| Germany to numbers in Britain, and that's without a legion of AI
| grannies sitting on the phone!
| huac wrote:
| real-time full duplex like OpenAI GPT-4o is pretty expensive.
| cascaded approaches (usually about 800ms - 1 second delay) are
| slower and worse, but very very cheap. when I built this a year
| ago, I estimated the LLM + TTS + other serving costs to be less
| than the Twilio costs.
| jackphilson wrote:
| which is why we need to adopt nuclear power so we run
| thousands of these so the odds of them picking up a bot
| instead of a person is overwhelmingly likely
| wepple wrote:
| Every type of defensive tech is nothing more than driving up
| the cost of attack.
|
| Doubling the dwell time for a scammer will halve their profits.
| That could have interesting second-order effects. Perhaps it
| makes it not worth it for some subset?
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Weird how she doesn't sound like an old lady. Just hearing the
| voice, she sounds about 45.
| xnx wrote:
| Seems like the logical endpoint of a lot of this is people
| getting paid directly for their attention. Want to call me? I've
| set a price of $5/call that I answer, and an additional
| $10/minute of listen time after the first 10 seconds. Want to
| send me an email? $1/email and $5/100 words. Anyone I have
| emailed is automatically on my allow-list, which I can also
| adjust manually.
| wzsddtc wrote:
| I think you have just described LinkedIn's business model,
| minus the fact that you don't get the money but the filter
| provider does.
| xnx wrote:
| Yes. There are all kind or brokers selling the attention of
| their audiences: Google, TV Networks, podcasts, LinkedIn,
| etc. I'd like to see another attempt at disintermediation in
| the space.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| And maybe like a temporary hold of the money, so you get it
| back if I'm convinced it's not spam. Probably would resolve 99%
| of spam issues in the real world and create a chain of trust.
| Add some temporary disabling feature as well if you're
| expecting a call from a random number too, so you're set.
| swores wrote:
| Sounds like a great solution to the minority of people like
| you and me who wouldn't mind the added steps of approving
| every real phone call as not spam after, having to remember
| how to set that you're expecting a call from a random number,
| etc. I can't see it being acceptable to enough people for any
| network to go down this road unless spam levels get way
| worse.
| toss1 wrote:
| Spam is already at the level of changing people's default
| behavior from answering calls that come in to (as I saw
| described abt younger mobile users) "would rather pick up a
| live hand grenade than an unknown caller"
|
| Personally, my default was to pick up and is now if
| recognized contact pickup, if not and I'm expecting an
| unknown call, scrutinize, then if pickup, only answer with
| a cough or two -- never "hello" or "yes" due to threat of
| voice cloning escalate to banks.
|
| Spam is universally detested
|
| My assessment is that voice calls are on the verge of going
| obsolete if the telcos fail to get a handle on spam. Yet
| the telcos behave as if they have no clue whatsoever and
| DGAF.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Reporting spam should be the other way around, it defaults
| to assuming a normal interaction.
|
| Consider: if you get harassed with a call or text you don't
| like, you send an SMS with that phone number to some known
| short code. You then receive $1 from the caller. If the
| caller cannot be found, the last verifiable link in the
| chain is responsible for paying the fine.
|
| This would cause carriers to behave overnight, instead of
| allowing foreign call centers to spoof other people's real
| private numbers with your area code.
| guidoism wrote:
| That's similar to the idea I had for combating texting spam: -
| If your number is in my address book then texts are free for
| you - If this is the first time you are contacting me then you
| pay me $1
|
| There are probably downsides and ways this will screw up real
| relationships but it will certainly increase the cost of spam.
| Nition wrote:
| One issue I can forsee:
|
| - Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to
| please add them to your contact list first so that they can
| message you.
|
| - After a while of half their clients not doing that and lots
| of fees on their end, contractors stop providing a phone
| number at all, asking you to please install ContractorApp to
| communicate with them.
| thejazzman wrote:
| I love every part of this. Not having things in writing is
| one of the most common tactics with bad contractors. And I
| miss their call backs because I have unknowns goto spam, so
| I have to remember to disable that feature...
| crummy wrote:
| Maybe when you first receive a text you see:
|
| This message is from an unknown number. (Accept / Block /
| Charge sender $1)
| telgareith wrote:
| Well, that just invokes we-had-a-baby-its-a-boy
| sailfast wrote:
| They had a baby.
|
| It's a boy!
|
| That said - perhaps harder to change the name that shows
| up as quickly as you could leave a recorded name? :)
|
| Still one of the best ads ever made.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| They already charge $200 so I doubt $1 extra is going to
| matter.
| asah wrote:
| one click to add from the first message = $1 total cost.
|
| contractors can add this to their invoices if they care.
| jameshart wrote:
| You just made the new scam 'persuading you to text me'. I get
| $1 for everyone I fool!
| bawolff wrote:
| If you have already sorted the world between people you want to
| take calls from and people you don't, why wouldn't you just
| block the people you don't want instead of charging them money?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Because there's a middle ground of people who we have not yet
| categorized. I don't know every phone number my doctor might
| call me from.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| My doctor, bank, eh well everyone, will text or email me if
| they cannot reach me. I haven't answered a number I don't
| recognize for the past 10 years; life is excellent.
| bawolff wrote:
| And you think your doctor would be willing to pay for the
| privledge of talking to you?
| xnx wrote:
| My attention is valuable. I should be able to sell it on my
| terms.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| No way to vet the quality of your offering makes a both-
| ways attention economy fundamentally unworkable in a
| Western society. If you were really prepared to be an
| 'attention worker', then you could go work at a click farm
| or content moderation firm or the like, one of the fastest
| growing markets in the developing world.
|
| Best I can offer you is an in-game bonus for watching an
| ad.
| bawolff wrote:
| Is it though? Like it might be valuable to you, but i doubt
| its valuable to anyone else in a phone call situation and
| both parties need to find value to make a sale.
|
| Like if you are interested in the convo then you should be
| paying the other person as you are getting value from the
| convo.
|
| What's the situation where you don't care about the convo
| but for the right price you could care, and the other party
| also thinks that price is reasonable? Like maybe if someone
| is trying to recruit you i guess, but the situations where
| that is true seem very few and far between (and we already
| have a system for that, where traditionally someone offers
| to buy you a meal in exchange for listening)
| lozf wrote:
| > Is it though?
|
| Marketers seem to think so, or they wouldn't waste their
| time calling.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _What 's the situation where you don't care about the
| convo but for the right price you could care, and the
| other party also thinks that price is reasonable?_
|
| Minimally targeted advertising.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| No one's buying your attention on your terms. They're only
| exchanging it for the online services you want to use. No
| attention, no services, better up your subscriptions budget
| or make do without.
|
| (Sorry if I'm being blunt, attention economy participants
| can't be so they'd sugar coat it to such a degree that you
| might miss the point).
| speerer wrote:
| Satoshi Nakamoto's first visionfor Bitcoin was just this - pay-
| to-send email.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 90% sure this was also an idea in Bill Gates' "The Road
| Ahead"
| wcoenen wrote:
| I think you're thinking of Hashcash? Not invented by Satoshi,
| and not pay-to-send exactly. It's proof-of-work for email.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
| speerer wrote:
| I'm certain Satoshi was thinking of Hashcash! But I did
| mean what I said, though it wasn't until Martti Malmi
| released his emails with Satoshi that I knew this, and so
| might not be well known:
|
| https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/
|
| > "[this next bit turned out to be very controversial.
| there is extreme prejudice against spam solutions,
| especially proof-of-work.]
|
| > It can already be used for pay-to-send e-mail. The send
| dialog is resizeable and you can enter as long of a message
| as you like. It's sent directly when it connects. The
| recipient doubleclicks on the transaction to see the full
| message. If someone famous is getting more e-mail than they
| can read, but would still like to have a way for fans to
| contact them, they could set up Bitcoin and give out the IP
| address on their website. "Send X bitcoins to my priority
| hotline at this IP and I'll read the message personally."
| janalsncm wrote:
| I have considered creating this email service. I'm sure many
| others have as well, in some form or another. Does it already
| exist?
| j2kun wrote:
| Pay to email has been tried multiple times, and failed.
| edelbitter wrote:
| Or.. just have telcos do that to each other, instead of
| offloading any more of their service onto their
| customers/victims?
| mos_basik wrote:
| That's EVE Online's approach to fighting ingame "email" spam
| [0].
|
| Every player can configure an amount of ingame money that is
| levied from a sender's account to deliver a message to them.
| It's a currency sink, so it's themed as a "tax" levied by the
| NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the
| recipient of the message.
|
| I thought it used to default to 5 ISK (a pittance, something
| you can make back by shooting a single NPC pirate ship). I see
| some references to the default being ~2000 ISK at the time that
| it was changed to 0, where it is now.
|
| Worked pretty well, imo. Players that need to be publicly
| contactable (people who organize public events, for instance)
| can turn it off easily. People who are "space famous" can crank
| it up to reduce targeted spam. Even at the default setting,
| it's effective at keeping ingame scammers from blasting the
| whole player list with messages (at least, the poor ones :).
| Doesn't apply to people you've already exchanged messages with.
| I think there's also some allowlisting you can do, etc.
|
| 0.
| https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_Mail#CONCORD_Spam_Prevent...
| watusername wrote:
| If you use a VoIP service like Twilio and voip.ms, you can set up
| a very simple IVR menu that just asks unknown callers to press 1
| to be connected to you. No AI involved.
|
| For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls.
| Obviously this isn't going to work against scammers who call
| directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some
| pre-recorded message which isn't going to pass the menu.
|
| Edit: s/auto/pre
| morkalork wrote:
| If they ever get clever enough to automate the menu selection,
| it would be funny to have an infinitely deep IVR sort of like
| the tar pits people build on websites to trap web crawlers.
| thfuran wrote:
| I think I've gotten exactly one spam call since I set up an IVR
| like that a few years ago, and it was probably not quite daily
| before that.
| Ronnie76er wrote:
| My Pixel 8 (not sure what other Android phones do this) can
| screen calls using their AI assistant. It asks what the call is
| about. If they answer, it displays the text to you as it rings
| through.
|
| It sounds surprisingly human-like, even saying "Hello?" in a
| slightly annoyed tone when the other person doesn't respond in
| time.
| permo-w wrote:
| that is a surprisingly awesome phone feature
| tandr wrote:
| I have pixel 7, and I think this feature is or very unstable,
| or cell-provider dependent. It was on my phone, then was not,
| then re-appeared briefly again, now it is not even in
| settings.
| whartung wrote:
| Have your Bot call my Bot and they'll have lunch.
| koyote wrote:
| Those Pixel features are underrated.
|
| Another good one is for the phone to stay on hold for you.
| That one has been extremely valuable to me as Qantas would
| regularly keep me on hold for over 5 hours when I tried to
| get my money back for a cancelled flight. The operator would
| sometimes be a bit confused when I pick up, but it usually
| worked well and certainly beats listening to hold music for
| hours.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Its kind of funny to think we've already had many of these
| services that were apparently really ahead of their time.
|
| I remember being an outside sales rep for a local mom and pop
| wireless company in the late 90's, early aughts. We sold an
| automated "assistant" called Wildfire that would screen calls
| and stood as an intermediary between you can callers. She would
| answer, you would record your name and then it would call you
| on any number of devices you had entered. At one point, I had
| it calling three of my numbers (office and two mobile numbers)
| and at any time, you could just send people to voicemail. It
| was very similar to how many of the AI assistants work today.
| If I remember it was like $30/month, but as reps we got to use
| it for free which was really fun tinkering with it.
|
| AT&T also had something like this where you could have a
| program they offered which would screen your calls and either
| connect you or you could send people directly to voicemail. It
| didn't have nearly the features that Wildfire had, but it was
| effective.
|
| Obviously in the late 90's and early aughts, something like
| this wasn't really needed and after a few quarters, AT&T
| quietly stopped offering their service. Wildfire lived on until
| the mid aughts after being bought and then killed due to lack
| of adoption and use.
|
| Kind of crazy these kinds of programs were pretty common before
| the AI assistant craze now.
|
| Details about Wildfire here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_Communications
| mxuribe wrote:
| I seem to vaguely recall this Wildfire brand name....Because
| when i first got google voice, it was really half of an
| acquired company...which if remember correctly was a
| competitor to wildfire, no? Like grandcentral or something?
| Anyway, yeah, when i first got google voicemail, this feature
| was really impressive! But, of course eventually learned that
| this tyoe of thing already existed in some corners :-)
| clutch89 wrote:
| It's a great idea, and in Canada using the Koodo/Telus network
| you can turn on "call control" for free which does basically
| this, except it makes the caller enter a random number between
| 1-9. And you can also whitelist certain numbers like friends
| and family.
| cedws wrote:
| Very nice to see, my grandmother was recently scammed out of a
| large amount of money. Luckily the bank reimbursed her.
|
| Scammers are a stain on the reputation of India. You could argue
| it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same brush, but
| quite clearly rule of law isn't properly functioning over there
| and there's complicity in letting them do this. Same goes for
| Nigeria.
| jusonchan81 wrote:
| I wonder when will the scammer also create an AI scammer.
|
| Joke aside, is this going to be cost effective? What would it
| cost to keep a scammer on the phone for an hour? Who will pay
| this bill?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| So, scammers start using these things too (obviously), and so AI
| will be trying to scam AI, then they'll be like "we need to
| detect when our bots are talking to a bot, so they can exit the
| call sooner." GANWAR
| sangnoir wrote:
| Remember: O2 gets paid for incoming international calls by the
| minute
| pityJuke wrote:
| If Jim Browning is involved, it might not be terrible. Let's see.
| yesthisiswes wrote:
| My father setup his own solution for robocalls. If the phone
| rings more than three times it kicks the call to the fax machine.
| Apparently fax lines are supposed to be kept clear because of
| legal reasons? All I know is half the time I call I get a dialup
| sound as my call gets routed to the fax machine.
| milleramp wrote:
| Jolly Roger has been doing this for a while, the example phone
| calls are hilarious.
| https://youtube.com/@jollyrogertelephone?si=sB3Tiql0wsUlXldo
| outside1234 wrote:
| Or we could just make these calls illegal?
| Tepix wrote:
| Right. These scam calls are not a god-given problem. Some
| countries do not have them in any significant amount. I suspect
| there is greed involved (political or corporate) that prevents
| this problem from getting solved.
| notahacker wrote:
| They are. Sometimes people continue to do things _even though
| they 're illegal_
| alexjplant wrote:
| So it's just an AI re-implementation of the Telecrapper 2000 [1]?
| The original site is down but there are plenty of YouTube videos
| [2] of it still available.
|
| [1] https://hackaday.com/2005/09/08/telecrapper-2000/
|
| [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK_zHisT_A
| bityard wrote:
| That's pretty hilarious. Amazing what you can do with just a
| well-crafted pre-recorded script.
|
| There are some other Youtube videos where a guy writes these
| ChatGPT personalities, but those aren't as entertaining because
| the AI is basically just blurting out random thoughts rather
| than engaging in an actual conversation.
| darkr wrote:
| Great PR move, but surely better to invest in more basic security
| measures supported by their app (chain of trust, verified
| callers/messaging etc). Instead their app is primarily a react
| native sales tool. Part of the reason that o2 was so affected by
| scammers calling from south Asian call centres with "the latest
| offers" was because they used to do exactly this with their
| customers.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| To be clear while I don't enjoy the idea of receiving low-
| effort sales calls, I do think that real scammers are
| different. Real scammers don't have a business, aren't willing
| to go to court, etc.
| pointy_hat wrote:
| Imagine a day when a scam bot will talk to AI granny.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I love that they are weaponizing the perceived kindness of senior
| citizens in this way. Many of the victims of scams are some of
| the nicest people ever that were taken advantage of in some
| capacity - usually while trying to help someone. It's the digital
| age equivalent of staging a broken down cart and then robbing
| some old folks. I think most of us hate the idea of the
| "solution" being to not go near anyone with a broken down cart
| out of fear.
|
| I'm not saying this fixes everything, but I would rather a world
| where scammers odds at making a living at this are so poor they
| won't bother versus a world where everyone has to block every
| number by default and live in metaphorical bunkers to never
| interact because you might be a scammer.
| aantix wrote:
| What's the best API for real-time conversations?
|
| Strangely, I looked at OpenAI's offering.
|
| Despite it being crazy expensive, they also didn't offer a
| reference implementation anywhere close to the functionality that
| is demo'ed in the regular ChatGPT app.
|
| Nobody seems to get the interruptions correct - people are doing
| all sorts of weak workarounds like push-to-talk, etc.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Seems stupid to publicly announce this product so that scammers
| are now aware of it? Also what happens when scammers start using
| AIs of their own to do the scamming?
| notahacker wrote:
| If scammers are wondering if a confused little old lady who's
| the first person to listen to them all day is actually an AI
| programmed to be nice that's... probably not a bad thing
| Archelaos wrote:
| Wait until the scammers become AIs too. Thinking of a world where
| phone conversations between humans is the exception ...
| mcbuilder wrote:
| Other controversies aside, this could end up being a bit of a
| organic Turing test, if the AI ever becomes convincing to enough
| scammers.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Wondering when an AI passes the HN Turin test. -- Or has it
| already happened?
| staticshock wrote:
| Scammers can jam this by reporting legitimate phone numbers as
| scam numbers, no?
| brap wrote:
| This reminds me of "shadow banning" - instead of letting the
| misbehaving user know they've been banned, and let them find a
| way around it, you make them believe they're not banned and let
| them waste their time interacting with the system (without
| actually interacting with others), this makes them spend less
| time on actual misuse and it makes the penalty for it more
| expensive. Good strategy. Cruel too.
|
| So I don't think that this is just entertaining PR, I can see why
| it's better than simply banning the scammers. Still a question of
| cost though.
| bityard wrote:
| No doubt it has been misused at some point or another, but
| shadow banning in the context of online communities is
| generally a last-resort defense against the very worst and most
| prolific trolls. Not someone who accidentally breaks forum
| etiquette one time.
|
| A person who is shadow banned generally continues their
| antisocial behavior in the face of multiple warnings and
| reprimands. I don't see it as cruel. I see it as defending the
| community against those who get pleasure out of trying to wreck
| it. It's effective because the bannee is generally too dim to
| realize what has happened to them until they get bored and go
| away.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Good on them!
|
| _> and one in five (22%) experiencing a fraud attempt every
| single week_
|
| That seems low. I guess they mean phone calls only.
|
| I get -no exaggeration- several _hundred_ spam mails a day (and
| these are the ones that made it past the first line defense). I
| also get 10 or more scam texts.
|
| Some of the phising emails that I get, are frighteningly
| realistic (but invariably seem to have at least one speling eror
| in them).
|
| If folks live in a normal suburban development, they are highly
| unlikely to get several hundred crooks, knocking on their door,
| every day, but being on the Internet, means exactly that.
|
| The crooks only need to land you once, you have to have a perfect
| record, avoiding them.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day
|
| I've seen no legit spam e-mail in years, on my very old, very
| used, "forums and other logins I don't care about", 2005 gmail
| address. What provider are you using?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| mac.com.
|
| I have an OG address that was registered about five minutes
| after Steve introduced the service.
|
| Network Solutions sold it to spammers, and the rest is
| history.
|
| Also, a couple other of my emails (and phone numbers) are
| associated with businesses, so are sort of public record (not
| really, but everyone finds out, anyway).
| rickcarlino wrote:
| This reminds me of Dead Internet Theory. We have a phone network
| of AI scammers endlessly calling AI counter scammers. What a time
| to be alive.
| gorkish wrote:
| Boy howdy, wait until you hear how rural phone companies make
| money.
|
| There is one simple and easy solution to this mess, but good
| luck getting traction on it.
| JSDevOps wrote:
| They would be better sorting themselves out first rather than
| working on this nonsense
| JasserInicide wrote:
| If this is just a PR stunt, imagine what they're cooking up
| behind the scenes: AI reps to answer actual customer calls. No
| more paying a horde of $10/hr meat slaves in some call center!
| You know some execs creamed themselves over this already.
| stewx wrote:
| Lenny was the OG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM
| luispa wrote:
| honeAI pot
| tomcam wrote:
| The "Daisy" AI sounds exactly like a female version of Bill
| Nighy.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Actually the google phone as some spam blocking additional to the
| one in my carrier which is crap, I was using the samsung app and
| I was getting spam calls always, I set up google one , now I get
| none
| bsdice wrote:
| The scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this
| day. And has been for 10 years.
|
| A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really
| hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180
| minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well
| not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be
| reachable.
|
| It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples
| as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after
| Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to
| Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without
| interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP
| provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from
| the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated
| number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling
| peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number
| prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as
| number@t-mobile.de for example, while a spam call would say
| fakenumber@01012.com.
|
| Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the
| audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while,
| but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox.
| Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call
| is finished right away.
|
| It works great to this day, because I never published it.
| Ocha wrote:
| Screen unknown callers to VM. Solved all my problems
| scudsworth wrote:
| cant even stand to watch (or listen to) more than 5 seconds of
| the obviously generated granny. i doubt even the audio will be
| convincing enough.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| Wait till the AI scammers start calling
| burger_moon wrote:
| I applied for a mortgage today through my bank. Before the
| automated "next steps" email could hit my inbox my phone was
| already ringing and ringing and ringing. About 10 minutes
| straight of automated spam callers that are watching who knows
| what public ledger on now.
|
| I guess it pretty much means retiring this number next year. I've
| inly had the number a little over a year and the spam has slowly
| crept up despite best efforts to give fake numbers where
| possible.
| pnw wrote:
| I see a large number of spam emails with the "fake invoice" scam,
| and I've often thought an AI powered voice bot could really waste
| the time of the scammers call center and save some senior
| citizens money and grief. Has anyone developed an open source
| equivalent?
| danslacker wrote:
| "granny i'd like to fuck" PS: Dan Gackle likes to watch, and he
| pays $100.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Whenever I go home to visit my elderly parents, I'm amazed at how
| many scam calls they get. Like at least 4 or 5 an hour. And they
| pick up each one because they're from a time when you simply pick
| up your phone when it rings, and they won't change their habits.
|
| It's long past time that phone calls should stop being
| synchronous and immediate. They are only this way because
| historic landlines were synchronous and immediate, and nobody
| changed it. This functionality should be culturally unacceptable
| in 2024.
|
| Imagine if the concept of a land line never existed. Then, a
| startup came out with an app that: 1. allowed random people to
| cause your handheld device to stop what it was doing and
| immediately ring and vibrate and pop up a dialog over whatever
| app was active, 2. when you pushed a button, an instant two way
| audio channel was initiated, and 3. they could do all this
| without any authentication whatsoever--just needing to know a
| non-secret 10 digit number. This kind of app would fail every App
| Store guideline, and it would be laughed out of the ecosystem as
| unacceptable to end users. But in reality, it's "The Phone App"
| that comes pre-installed on your damn phone!! Insane that this
| kind of application is acceptable.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I really enjoy the Google Pixel exclusive call screener.
|
| https://youtu.be/V2IyttWHJfs?si=mreFXk6h-yDAJ3D7&t=50
|
| I've had a few friends get new numbers, and seeing "Hey it's your
| Aunt, I got a new phone" live transcribed on the screen has come
| in handy.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| This goes to show how tech can be a double edged sword. Sure, AI
| is going to be abused by scammers, but in the never ending arms
| race its also going to be used against them.
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