Do you know annoying scam calls on the phone? A man has developed an app with ChatGPT that drives phishing callers insane.
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Every now and then, one receives calls from unknown people: They pose as police officers or bank employees, warning or threatening about some dangers. Such scam calls are disturbing and dangerous.
A man from California has developed a tool that is supposed to keep scammers on the line to waste their time. His app or service is based on ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, he has thousands of customers who pay him 25 euros each year for this service. On average, he earns more than 50,000 euros a year from it. He does not disclose how many customers he has exactly.
Man develops chatbot and now has thousands of customers
Roger Anderson runs a subscription service called Jolly Roger. The chatbot answers the call and then tries to stall for time. He explains how it works with an example given to the Wall Street Journal (behind the paywall):
- A chatbot named ‘Whitey’ Whitebeard, which is based on ChatGPT, answers a call from a recorded female voice that issues a warning about an account at Bank of America.
- When the chatbot responds, the telemarketer’s call is forwarded to an actual person who tries to talk to the chatbot about credit card consolidation.
- Since the caller is apparently not working for Bank of America, he received only silly answers that prolonged the conversation.
- The scammer eventually hung up out of frustration.
Why does this work? Anderson explained that his system is trained to make the chatbot sound like a real person on the phone. Therefore, scammers assume they are actually speaking with a real person.
Anderson told WSJ that his chatbots use a combination of preset expressions and topic-specific responses that are fed through a voice clone, so the caller thinks he or she is actually speaking with a real person.
For a scamming person, it is annoying and time-consuming; other people can certainly be protected by such a chatbot. Even today, enough people still fall for scam calls or people who rely on the gullibility of others. These people lose a lot of money, which they will never see again.
Such nasty people exist everywhere: A woman has now gone too far. She has deceived a lot of people because she wanted to buy new Apple products. She relied on a very similar scheme as those scammers on the phone:
