It did also manage to flood their phone lines making their call center useless for a while.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8wg4/we-talked-...
I remember first seeing it a while ago, posted here, ironically (or perhaps naturally) in a thread about Spamnasty (also excellent).
I'm not sure. Even though it is, as you say, remarkably unsophisticated on a technical level, it is extremely accomplished on a artistic level.
When I first learned about Lenny, I listened to most of his conversations, and it's impressive to hear how often he actually seems to be answering questions or gets distracted in just the right way at just the right time.
The writing (and acting) is just about perfect. I don't know if this is because of sheer genius, or simply lightning in a bottle, but either way I doubt it could be simply reproduced hundreds of times.
I'm not sure.
Does it count as passing the Turing test, or the scammers don't count as experts?
Come to think of it, the scammers themselves would fail the Turing test.
It would be a much easier version of the test if the AI only has to fool the examiner in a limited set of circumstances such as a scammer trying to qualify people as potential scam targets with a minimum of effort.