It doesn’t matter how much care you take online, most of us have received a suspicious scam email at one point or another. Whether its an email alerting us to the fact we’ve won the lottery or that a friend is stuck in a foreign land and requires money transferred to them immediately, email scams are increasingly common.
With cybercrime reportedly costing New Zealand almost $257 million in the last year – the global figure hits well into the hundred billion dollar range – the clever folk at Netsafe New Zealand have launched Re:scam to try and beat scammers at their own game.
Instead of hitting delete and moving scam emails into your trash, internet users can now send scam emails to [email protected]. Re:scam does the rest with its well-educated artificial intelligence that has been programmed to engage scammers in an ongoing exchange. In short, it will waste time the scammers would have otherwise spent targeting potential victims.
Not convinced an AI could convincingly imitate you over email? With that in mind, Re:scam uses humour and grammatical errors to ensure the correspondence is as human-like as possible all while collecting data that will help bring cybercriminals down.
“We are really concerned about the growth of predatory email phishing, while victims remain essentially powerless,” says CEO of Netsafe, Martin Cocker. “We feel the scale of the problem far outweighs the attention it receives, and we want to empower people to take action. Re:scam provides them with the opportunity to do so.
Find out how Re:Scam works in the video below and then give it a go yourself by simply forwarding scam emails to [email protected].
