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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

The most essential part of "trolling spammers" is to use considerably less effort/resources to string them along than it costs them to proceed. Otherwise, it kind of raises a question of who's trolling who.

Even forgiving the work you put in to set all this up (a fun Saturday, for sure), do you imagine you're doing that here?

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Not OP, but personally, I subscribe to a different economic theory: by engaging a scammer I am diverting their resources towards me and away from someone else.

It’s not a perfect rationale and I see what you mean but, for me, it would be like confronting a thug on the street when one has good reason to believe they are victimizing someone else out of sight. Would I lose more by confronting them than they stand to gain, or should I just confront them no matter what?

And the solution to that is that the scammers are actually kidnapped and enslaved people. So all you end up doing is getting some poor kidnapped slave beaten for missing their quota.

What, you think the crime lords in charge of these scams actually do the grunt work? That's what kidnapping is for.

And if this ends up being endemic and all the slaves are beaten for missing their quotas and no one is making any money then they'll be forced to move onto something else, because the crime lords are in it for money no other reason

The same applies to any antiscam measures. Maybe blame the crime lords rather than those trying to reduce the number of victims.

Depends on where you live. It's very well known that Ukrainian scammers who work every Russian-speaking country* are part of large companies, work in downtown $CITY in plain view of SBU that is supposed to be suppressing them, and make good money from their work. If they messaged rather than called, I would be very happy to adapt this project and use it against the fuckers.

* including mine (not Russia) -- incessant daily calls to every person I know.

Which one? We're curious now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territ...

They've mentioned before that it's Kazakhstan.

"I'm curious, but not enough to investigate on my own!"

I'm curious, but it did not occur to me to go to the user's profile, and check other posts on unrelated stories.

Or they are scammers in Nigeria, Senegal or India for whom it is their dream job (nothing against these countries, it is just z dad fact of life that the scams, at least for France, come mostly from there)

No matter the cost, it's satisfying to trick somebody who thinks that they're tricking you.

The spammers are using LLMs too. Everyone in lead generation are using these tools, even though its against certain regulations and policies (TCPA, TCR, etc).

So, no one is wasting time, maybe a few minutes when they get a notification that the lead is "hot".

There's value in making the "hot lead" signal useless, though.

You can also collect a few thousand dollars for the TCPA violation, which seems more productive.

I totally disagree. For one, for every minute the spammers spend on someone trolling them, that is real harm not being done to people in the world. That’s high value. Second, this is a fun side project that this person would have been investing time in regardless (I assume), so it might as well be a side project that adds real value to the world.

So you believe it's a human on the other end. In that case, an LLM might meet the efficiency criteria, sure.

More likely, though it's using an even more cost efficient technique and isn't consuming much or any human attention at all here.

It’s a human on the other end. My suspicion of how it works is that the first several messages are scripted no matter the response, and then upon passing some gates you get a human in the loop. Makes sense too, them not wasting a human on the first several messages.

It’s little to no value. These SMS operations are very efficient and horizontally scalable, running thousands of conversations in parallel, even one human can be talking to multiple people.

What if the spammer’s alternative to interacting with you/the LLM is to sit around chit chatting with their friends waiting for a call/chat queue? I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that a spammer spends with a troll is one minute the spammer isn’t spamming to someone else

The cost to set it up might be a Saturday but the ongoing cost is zero.

Sadly that isn't true: it requires a server to be running to receive message content from the phone app, run inference using the LLM and send back responses. All of that requires electrical power and maintenance at the very least.

In this always connected, SaaS-dominated world, it saddens me that all too often people marginalize the cost of keeping all that infrastructure up and running.

Except this is a pretty good case for using an SBC:

1. they're fairly low power and

2. the LLM speed is less of an issue because SMSs like this don't warrant an instant reply anyway so if it takes 2 or 3 minutes to generate that's fine

In this case we’re talking about one guy responding asynchronously to a handful of spammers per day. It’s something you could run on an old laptop. It doesn’t need a server or 11 9s of uptime.

This is a hobby project. Some people write a compiler. This looks more fun.

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