Spam spammers back | Hacker News Reader

Spam spammers back

stavros.io

34 pointstoomuchtodo12 comments

By the time I got close to the end of the article I was waiting for some kind of payoff where the spammer gets a bag of karma and we get to read some kind of amusing email exchange.

It seems like the only thing that OP gets out of this is telling spammers that their email address is active. Now even though ChatGPT is the one replying, the human at the other end knows you’re a real person and that this is your real email.

Mark the email as spam and move on. Harassing poor people in third world countries working for spam companies isn’t going to help the situation for anyone including yourself.

That's wrong. Every minute spent interacting with a fake lead is a minute lost with a real scam victim.

The answer is to "reply" from a throwaway email account. That keeps your real email off active target lists. No spammer uses unique reply-to emails per recipient, so there's no trace back to your original email address. That requires brains for them to setup.

I guess if you assume that I care about other scam victims and that I don’t value my time.

I doubt the effectiveness of this theory anyway, it sounds like trying to stop street crime by buying up all the drugs.

It's more akin to keeping a robocall on the line so they can't make another call.

Yes, I do that with phone spam, at least the calls that aren't blocked. I always press the “speak with a human” key, and then keep talking to the person until they hang up on me (they always do). I'm retired, so my time doesn't cost anything, and doing this makes their day's work a little less productive. Seems like a good trade-off to me.

Nice, problem is that most just want you to click a phishing link rather than write back to them. How can we waste phishing attackers time? Boot up a docker image and have them ransomware that?

That's unwise too...maybe most phishers aren't great hackers but don't give strangers with malicious intent access to your machine.

Very evil.

Spam is not black and white. The definition for spam is: unsolicited commercial messages broadcast to large number of addresses. How does the author know that the message he got was sent to large number of other addresses? He seems to just abuse authors of any unsolicited messages he got, with the number of recipients of messages being arbitrarily small.

Do you do cold contact sales for a living or something? It seems like odd behavior to defend someone who clearly doesn’t care about or respect you.

> Do you do cold contact sales for a living or something?

I don't exclude that I would have to. I'm only defending human dignity.

Don’t spam me, don’t get bullshit back.Seems easy to avoid.

No, if a person didn't spam, they still could receive a fake conversation.

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