AI to Solve Phone Scams
AI to Solve Phone Scams

AI to Solve Phone Scams

I bet a portion of you reading this already know exactly what it contains based on the title. Let's make it happen!

If you are not aware, there is an epidemic of phone scams occurring for the past several years. There are entire call centers, mostly located in India, dedicated to scamming American & European senior citizens out of hundreds to hundreds-of-thousands (choose any currency, though mostly in USD).

The details on how the scams work vary, but one thing generally remains the same throughout: it is the victim that initiates a phone call to the scam call center to request "tech support", generally in order to remove malware from the victim's machine (malware creates a Windows pop-up that tells the victim that they have been infected by a virus, and provides the victim a phone number to call, connecting them to the scam call center). The victim initiating the call to the call center is key to the scam as the call center doesn't otherwise have the phone numbers to reach the victims who have downloaded the malware (and that would be quite a bit more sus if the call centers initiated the call). This victim-initiated call is a potential vulnerability to attack the scams!

Now, lets take a voice-communication-capable AI, such as Google Assistant (or whatever it is called these days). Give the AI a varying voice and personality of a typical victim: old folx, non-tech-savvy people, etc etc. Easy targets, however it is decided. Find the scam call centers' phone numbers based on the latest attacks. Based on info from YT, the scams generally take 15 mins to several hours to execute to completion with the victim on the phone with the call center (dealing with bank transfers, gift cards, etc - whatever the latest scam entails). Train the AI to pretend to be a victim who is calling the call center from a spoofed phone number. The AI will tie up the scammers' time for as long as it possibly can, providing fake information (bank numbers, etc) where necessary.

That's it! The scam centers generally have between 5 and 50+ workers taking calls at any given time. Allot a single server with 100+ iterations of these fake-victim AI's that call the scam call centers from spoofed phone numbers, tying up the scammers' time with what they (hopefully) can't differentiate from calls coming from real victims.

To be clear, the goal would be to water-down the call traffic to the call centers with enough fake-victim calls that the success rate of the scams drops to below financial viability, causing the call centers to collapse over the course of several months. Obviously, the scammers would still receive calls from actual victims and there would be some rate of successful scams associated with those calls, so the number of active fake-victim AI might need to scale appropriately over time.

What do you think? Will this work?

submitted by /u/i_Sobel
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