Two years spent spamming spammers back

https://medium.com/@beweinreich/two-years-spamming-spammers-back-2e734ce9593c#.djy3sqs70

by beweinreich • 10 years ago

457 129 10 years ago

Exuma• 10 years ago

This is great, and would be even more brilliant if it could integrate some sort of markov chain, like https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator

I'd love to see it have random answers that are unique based on the question. Then you make it a global service that hundreds of thousands of people can forward messages to, and then you waste spammers time en masse.

chipperyman573• 10 years ago

The problem with a markov chain is that the sentences it generates are often nonsensical. A markov chain is useful for predicting a few words out of a sentence a human already has generated, but not an entire sentence.

gus_massa• 10 years ago

Can anyone forward an email to that address? :)

Do you have localized versions? [I'm from Argentina and Most of my spam is in Spanish. I guess no. :( ]

chrischen2• 10 years ago

It would be great if someone could implement this as a free public service, using neural algorithms to generate responses.

Waterluvian• 10 years ago

I agree. But I have to say I had a chuckle that the second half of your sentence looks like hipster mode to me.

chrischen2• 10 years ago

There are services for this already, actually, such as wit.ai and api.ai. Wit.ai is free.

ikeboy• 10 years ago

http://www.419eater.com has many organic neural nets doing just that. (Sorry, I've always wanted to make that joke.)

nkozyra• 10 years ago

Actually I think a NN might require way too much supervision. You could feed exits (emails that got no response) into a decision tree to know what to send at any point in the chain to maximize response.

ttul• 10 years ago

You could train an LSTM network to generate responses in the same way that google's inbox response suggestions work. Requires a mountain of source data, but hey, you probably have 30GB of email sitting in your Gmail, right?

sztwiorok3• 10 years ago

Great tool

Please share this on github. we will be able to add our sugestions to the list of answers!

PudgePacket• 10 years ago

The author gave the link in the article https://github.com/beweinreich/mlooper.

sztwiorok3• 10 years ago

Thanks for it.

brightball• 10 years ago

These guys operate on an ROI basis. If you waste their time you decrease their ROI.

Great tool.

hackbinary• 10 years ago

This is why I tend to take spam phone calls for double glazing and PPI. I talked to a guy for an hour once. My strategy to be the affable fool.

dhimes• 10 years ago

Tom Mabe did this and recorded it- released a hilarious cd

cxmcc• 10 years ago

Love it! For physical spam mails with business reply envelope, I always fold everything back into the envelope and send it back.

6502nerdface• 10 years ago

Never thought of that, good call. They presumably pay for the reply postage, reducing their ROI.

dingaling• 10 years ago

Just remember to tear-off anything that looks personally identifiable ( address, reference numbers etc ).

There used to be a trick in the UK of attaching reply envelopes to bricks and putting them back into the postal system, hoping that the spammer would be charged by weight, but Royal Mail put an end to that.

mooveprince• 10 years ago

Made my day :)

imaginenore• 10 years ago

Would be cool to have this in GMail.

sztwiorok3• 10 years ago

Great idea!

I'm sure that GitHub community will help to make it even better

https://github.com/beweinreich/mlooper

dorianm• 10 years ago

The logic made me laugh :)

    def random_reply
      reply = Reply.order("RAND()").first.content

      # if the conversation is getting long, start injecting hipster sentences to the end...
      if self.conversation.emails.count > 10
        reply << " #{Faker::Hipster.sentence}"
      end
      return reply
    end

P.S.: It's a simple Rails app

verroq• 10 years ago

Should just connect two or more spammers together and let them offer their products to each other.

Lasher• 10 years ago

Oh that would be awesome, maintain a list of previous spammer emails then generate the responses from a random one of those.

ortusdux• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the cities that setup robocallers to cut down on illegal signs.

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-07-19/news/os-litte...

tamersalama• 10 years ago

Great idea! This has the potential of reducing worldwide spam/scam if is implemented by email service providers.

kalleboo2• 10 years ago

This is a great idea. Waste the spammer's time and it's no longer worth it.

The phone version of this is Lenny[0], a set of audio files/Asterisk script which pretends to be a senile, doddering old man (who has a duck problem). There's a reddit user who runs a number you can forward your sales calls to, and he'll pick out the best ones and put on YouTube[1]. The record is keeping a caller on the phone for 56 minutes.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nO... (edit: if you sort the user's videos by most popular, the top one is something quite amazing)

estefan• 10 years ago

This is great! I didn't know about Lenny :-D

gingerlime• 10 years ago

I was actually thinking it would be awesome to combine the two. Inject a phone number on one/some of the random responses and let Lenny pick up the phone and take it from there...

spacehome2• 10 years ago

In addition the telemarketers, I wasted a bunch of time listening to Lenny. This is amazing! Thanks!

Edit: I love his ducks

spacehome2• 10 years ago

If I let one of these "Windows Technical Department" guys into my Parallels Windows VM running on OS X, am I exposing myself to any danger?

mkagenius• 10 years ago

If you want a youtube clip to talk back to the spammer use : https://dubdial.com

disclosure: I am one of the author

GirlsCanCode• 10 years ago

Spam doesn't bother me anymore, but unsolicited phone calls do. The majority of phone calls that come in are not legitimate.

wofo• 10 years ago

You should probably check Lenny out: https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

pbhjpbhj4• 10 years ago

That's great, is there an app that will do this, like put it down next to your landline phone and let it answer for you?

maouida• 10 years ago

Gmail and other popular mail providers should implement something like this.

It would be a big step forward in spam fighting.

tomrod• 10 years ago

To connect the conversation to David Brin, futurologist, philosopher, and author, this sounds an awful like the crystal spheres in Existence.

grecy3• 10 years ago

Imagine if this type of thing happened in real-life. You walk out the door in the morning and you’re immediately attacked by Parul, Kevin, and Amelie.

I laughed out loud at this, because it's exactly what I'm experiencing now in West Africa.

Street vendors are aggressive about selling whatever they have, and they seem to assume I want it - almost like I owe it to them to buy it - I'm not sure if it's because I'm White, or it's just their standard procedure for everyone that walks by.

On my 3 minute walk to the local store, I get a minimum of 10 people in my face, trying to sell me cell phone recharge cards, peanuts and limes. Every single day I say no thanks, every single day they try again, sometimes even on the walk back.

I've tried ignoring them or not responding at all, and that usually makes it worse - they'll yell louder and louder (assuming I have not heard), hiss, make a kissing noise, and eventually put themselves in my way so I'm forced to acknowledge them.

Amazingly, even when I do buy something, and I clearly have it in my hand (a bunch of carrots for example), every single street vendor selling carrots will still try with 100% effort to sell me carrots.

pmorici• 10 years ago

Maybe that is where they came up with ad re-targeting.

bigdubs2• 10 years ago

Obviously not the same but I've had this happen in a couple places and I just say "FUCK OFF" as loud as I can and get visibly upset and they leave me alone after that.

grecy3• 10 years ago

....That's a horrible way to react. I wonder what these people think about you and your country of origin. You are, after all, an ambassador for your country when ever you are outside it.

adekok• 10 years ago

I've done the same with similar people in Europe. If they don't understand a polite but firm "No", and keep bugging me, then a firm "FUCK OFF" is what they deserve.

Oddly, I've never had any animosity returned. Just a shrug of "Oh well, I tried".

McP• 10 years ago

I found that just looking at them with an unconcerned, disinterested expression, then carrying on my way did the trick.

huehehue• 10 years ago

If you've ever been to NYC, this is pretty much the tour bus ticket salesmen. Some will follow you from behind with their arms outstretched in front of your face, flashing tour bus tickets.

After a particularly stressful day, one guy decides to take it upon himself to follow me like that for the better part of a city block. Ignoring him wasn't working, so I (honestly quite gently) brushed his hand out of my face, and the guy goes off, threatening to call the police and pulling in bystanders, asking if they just witnessed the terrible assault I've committed.

I guess the moral of the story is, don't work near Times Square.

rhizome2• 10 years ago

Next time: sneeze on their hands.

mancerayder• 10 years ago

I worked in Times Square for several years for two separate companies. I could make a long list of reasons why this is a disagreeable area to traverse twice a day, but that would be an emotive digression.

Instead I'll tell you what we locals do. You'll never be bothered by any vendor again. You do this : walk quickly, purposefully, scarcely making eye contact with your surroundings. Zig zag through crowds like it's destiny.

Perhaps I've made a terrible impression on the tourists I push past, but the signal I give off to vendors is, "I'm not in scope." I even act as a sort of sociopathic enforcer, particularly against those bus tour guys who stand in busy sidewalk areas with their signs.

I have intense familiarity with NYC Paris and London,having lived in all of these places. Being polite or nice or understanding to a random stranger on the sidewalk that wants something from me aggressively is to me a test to see whether I'm a sucker. Whether I'm vulnerable.

Save your politeness for people who aren't hustlers.

calebsurfs• 10 years ago

Locals usually have a way to get rid of street vendors that is effective, so finding out what that is in your locality is a good idea.

In Mexico, it's Hoy no (Not today) and it works pretty well.

craigsmansion4• 10 years ago

Why bother with that if you feel perfectly self-entitled, judging by the comments, to be aggressive and yell crude language at people who are just trying to make a living in a manner or cultural context you don't understand or want to have anything to do with?

fernly• 10 years ago

Yeah, on a tour of the highlights of Istanbul we were taught the word is YOK! which in Turkish basically means "it does not exist" or "cancel" or something. It worked.

bitwize• 10 years ago

Osaka was once the commerce center of old Japan, and to a certain extent that legacy remains: Osaka street and open-shop vendors give no fucks and seem to really crave that tourist money in particular. It's not as bad as you've described, but you can expect to be called out to by every corner fashion boutique salesgirl or streetside takoyaki vendor. Some even go to the length of learning English.

The upside of this is that people don't shy away from Westerners the way they do in Tokyo, which makes for a smootger experience if you enjoy talking to natives.

pbhjpbhj4• 10 years ago

every single street vendor selling carrots will still try with 100% effort to sell me carrots //

It's like giving in to a nagging child - they now know that you're an easy mark and will be even more determined to break you because they now know they can. You bought carrots from someone else, probably to stop them hassling you, so now if I want to sell t you I know if I'm annoying enough the chances are high you'll buy from me too.

Alexey_Nigin• 10 years ago

I had a similar experience in Thessaloniki, Greece. In this city, there is a famous tourist attraction called The White Tower (which has grey color, by the way). One day, I had to wait in Thessaloniki for a couple of hours, and I decided that it would be a great idea to sit down near the tower.

Well, it turned out to be a bad idea. A few hundred meters from the tower, I was greeted by someone who self-identified as a "friend from Jamaica". He tried to advertise something, but walked away after I asked him politely. As I continued my journey, I met more and more of these "friends". When I eventually reached the tower, I discovered that about 10 of these guys were circling around it. They were all very polite, but they advertised their stuff every time they stumbled upon me, which happened about once per minute. After some time, I decided to find a different place to rest.

jungletek• 10 years ago

Sounds like The White Tower in Thessaloniki is the street-level weed spot...

imgabe• 10 years ago

I had a similar experience in China and found it very helpful that a friend told me how to say "I don't want it" in Mandarin (Bu yao). Vendors will ignore your polite "No thank yous" in English, but they went away much faster after speaking their own language.

dylanz• 10 years ago

I was in Kraków and experienced something like this, albeit... possibly not as bad. I would put in headphones (a white and visible pair), and people would leave me alone.

Lxr• 10 years ago

This is hilarious, I love it. I would also love to see this made into a public service with some clever ML algorithms to keep the conversation going as long as possible.

qgaultier• 10 years ago

brillant !

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

Brilliant! But... of course some of the spammers are bots themselves.

countryqt30• 10 years ago

@ GOOGLE: BUILD THIS IN GMAIL! :)

koytch• 10 years ago

Effing hilarious. Some years ago I spent a few days writing to a 'Russian bride'. It became instantly clear all replies were scripted, there was no connection at all with what I said (The full text of 'I, Robot'? Oh, what interesting things you do…). So I'd say many if not most of the spam scenarios are automated and the whole thing becomes too meta.

kensai• 10 years ago

The dude deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for this. Literally pacifying the interwebs! :D

wojcikstefan• 10 years ago

Aren't most of these spam emails automated anyway? If it's just two bots talking, you're not really wasting anybody's time/resources.

the_duke2• 10 years ago

Hilarious idea.

But one of the first things I would have coded is preventing the same message to be sent again.

The examples are full of that.

brianwawok• 10 years ago

Indeed..

In fact why not take the inbound spams, and save those... and sprinkle them in to the outbound replies?

maksimum• 10 years ago

You could consider repeat messages as adding insult to injury. For example you can see in the 24-message conversation with the SEO company, that repeat messages seem to aggravate the spammers.

the_duke2• 10 years ago

Good point, I hadn't thought about that.

Dagwoodie• 10 years ago

Based on the sample of 24 messages back and forth, it looks like the spammer also had a reply bot because a lot of messages exactly the same canned response.

wanderr• 10 years ago

Back in the olden days, when the ping of death causing a windows BSOD was a thing, if I was online when I got spam I would immediately look for the spammer's ip and send them a ping of death. I could tell it often worked because then I'd get the same spam again 10 minutes later, so I'd do it to them again, then I'd get spammed again and ping them again until eventually they gave up.

I assume their mass mailing program would just start at the top of an email list and send them one by one, without tracking progress, so when the computer crashed they would have to start over. After a few crashes in a row hopefully the spammer would blame the spam sending program for crashing the computer and give up, maybe even demand a refund from whoever sold it to them.

abhianet• 10 years ago

What happens if I send it a mail from an mlooper address? Can I get it to setup an infinite loop?

codingdave• 10 years ago

Sure, great idea, funny and clever and all that.

But I disagree with the idea that inboxes are sacred, and disagree with the attitude of "how dare people send marketing to me!" Fraudulent spam is one thing. Plain old marketing or sales cold calls, though... you know people are going to do it. It is their job. And I'd much rather get emails than I can quickly delete and ignore vs. phone calls. And once in a while, someone actually hits on a service that is useful to me.

So I don't think the real-life scenario of people badgering you outside the door is accurate. The better metaphor would be one comparing your inbox to your actual mailbox. Sure, junk mail is annoying and most of it gets thrown out. But sometimes that restaurant down the street does send coupons.

halomru• 10 years ago

sales cold calls, though... you know people are going to do it. It is their job.

Sales cold calls are illegal in my country and happen to me once every few years. My email address isn't so lucky.

Sure, junk mail is annoying and most of it gets thrown out.

And more importantly: I can put a simple "no advertisements" sign on my real mailbox and cut down junk to almost zero. I wish I could do that to my virtual inbox.

Email junk is far worse than any real-live equivalent in my culture.

A better metaphor is having my business and private conversations while walking over a Middle-Eastern market where random people try to sell me stuff.

jacalata• 10 years ago

I can put a simple "no advertisements" sign on my real mailbox and cut down junk to almost zero.

Fun fact: this isn't possible in the US. I'd never considered how that might influence how Americans think about spam email in general.

khedoros• 10 years ago

They're people that know that they're wasting small amounts of time for large numbers of people and presumably gaining financially from some small number of those people. I delete the e-mails because it's the quick and convenient thing to do, but I don't have any problem with the idea of someone trying to waste their time. "It's their job" isn't a convincing argument; it sounds too much like the defense of "I was just following orders".

If someone feels entitled to someone else's time, I don't see any problem in turning the situation around. If there wasn't a good enough ROI on cold-call marketing, it would be rarer, and that sounds like a net benefit to me.

pbhjpbhj4• 10 years ago

Agreed, "it's their job" is a poor excuse - that's only because someone chose to make it their job. We could instead have a resource where you can search for what you want and use that resource to request things, oh wait we have that, so we don't need cold callers in society. They seem only useful to the capitalist owners who employ them.

wpietri2• 10 years ago

You are welcome to disagree with the notion for your inbox. If you want spam, godspeed. But other people get to decide for their inboxes.

And as to this: "You know people are going to do it. It is their job." This always puzzles me. So what?

Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job. That people have found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not mean I have to support them in any way.

In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's utility or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people they attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.

thingexplainer3• 10 years ago

You are welcome to disagree with the notion for your inbox.

And we did, by implementing Bayesian spam filters, not be making spam illegal. It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet.

Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job.

These are differences of kind, not degree.

That people have found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not mean I have to support them in any way.

Feel free to spend your money how you please, but do we really have to write it into the law?

Why is junk mail legal but spam is not? It's because Congress could understand the mechanics of junk mail, not because junk mail has any sort of moral or societal value lacking in spam.

In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's utility or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people they attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.

This is a pretty cynical view of marketing. Do you work somewhere with a marketing department? Is that what they do?

slinger• 10 years ago

I'm laughing out loud with these MLooper conversations. Made my day :D

PS: Nice project btw

partycoder• 10 years ago

Two related funny stories if you have the time:

- The 7 legged spider story.

- The guy that tricked Nigerian spammers into acting the dead parrot sketch from Monty Python

mastax• 10 years ago

I looked up these links so I might as well paste them here:

Spider: http://27bslash6.com/overdue.html Monty: http://www.419eater.com/html/bigman.htm

MaxLeiter• 10 years ago

If you find this funny, I highly recommend this TED talk: "This is what happens when you reply to a spam email"

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_...

eljimmy• 10 years ago

I once made the mistake of sending a joke reply to a spammer from my legitimate email.

Turned out they pulled my phone number from the WHOIS info on my domain which I can only assume they sold to some marketing companies as I received about a dozen cold calls from various "web agencies" from the states. A lot of them were relentless, calling me repeatedly and leaving voicemails.

Animats• 10 years ago

The one for phones has been on HN before. This one for spam is nice, but not yet smart enough. With more smarts and some understanding of the messages, it could keep spammers going forever. It doesn't need to be very intelligent; it just needs to get up to the Eliza level.

If it detects a spam related to search engine optimization, it should have a list of about a hundred plausible questions it can ask on that subject, for example. There aren't that many spammed subjects.

Most email spam, though, is promoting a link, and can't handle an email reply. You'd need something smart enough to go to a web site and sign up with fake credentials.

dcminter• 10 years ago

When especially irritated by spam of this type I like to look up the isp hosting their register link and then sign up on their site with its abuse@ details (or occasionally @localhost for a bit of variety). Every clog in the gears help or at least it's cathartic to imagine so.

wdr1• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the guy who set up an automated voice script on his landline to thwart telemarketers:

http://jollyrogertelephone.com/about/

titomc2• 10 years ago

One spammer realised that he is talking to a bot and asks the bot about the three laws.

http://www.mlooper.com/conversations/3072

maaaats• 10 years ago

This kinda rocked my view on spammers. It's easy to group them together and have a lot of prejudice, but clearly they come in all kinds of forms.

tempestn• 10 years ago

I would say that this sort of service spam is generally on a different tier from your classic 419 garbage or whatever. Usually those outfits will have their most competent person dealing with email to rope in new customers.

Amusing aside: I once hired one of these Indian web dev outsourcing firms to create a super simple form for one of our sites. (Not from a spam email, which I certainly wouldn't want to reward, but probably a similar outfit.) We could have done it in house, but I wanted to see how viable it would be to farm out simple, nicely encapsulated work when it came up.

Their failures were many and varied, but the most hilarious was when one of them wanted to givea section of form an orange border. (For some reason. The site's colour scheme was mostly greens with no orange to be seen.) Anyway, he decided the best way to do this was to find an enormous png of a sunset (multiple megabytes), and repeat a small strip of the top 10px or so as a background image in a div behind the area. I'm still not sure whether I was being trolled, or if incompetence on that scale is actually possible. (Normally I would assume it must be the former, but given their myriad other screw-ups, I'm not entirely sure.)

Every time I would write to complain about something utterly idiotic they'd done, they would wholeheartedly agree, share in my amazement at how foolish it was, and assure me that that junior programmer had been removed, and someone more senior would be taking over the project. (I went through a couple of levels of seniority, then eventually gave up when the Senior Lead Architect or whoever delivered the orange border monstrosity.)

Anyway, the most competent person in that company was definitely the one sending the emails.

chrissnell• 10 years ago

This reminds me of a script I wrote about a decade ago to deal with phishing sites. My script generated first and last names, email addresses, passwords, and credit card numbers that actual passed checksum validation. It would submit these fake entries to a phishing form just as fast as the remote end would take them, polluting their database/inbox/whatever with thousands of bogus submissions. Besides wasting their time and resources, it also smokescreened any legitimate submissions that might have come through.

aomix• 10 years ago

I thought spamd passive aggressively insulting spammers and tarpitting their connections was a good effort at wasting their time. This is a big step up from that.

robrenaud• 10 years ago

There is kind of a interesting Turing test scenario for AI here. Design an AI to maximize number of replies (or total text written) by the spammer. The internet is vast and full of spammers, you'll never run out of real humans providing responses to optimize your system.

mmwako• 10 years ago

I was just wondering: if every person did this with the spam they get (or maybe automatized by Gmail), spammers would be overflowed with bot answers to their spam emails, and would not be able to differentiate between a potential victim's response, and all the bot replys. This has the potential to actually SOLVE the problem of spam. Think this could work?

styrophone• 10 years ago

A lot of spam doesn't expect a response and only cares about link impressions.

ndesaulniers• 10 years ago

Please adapt this for technical recruiters!

Two years spent spamming spammers back

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