
Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time - StavrosK
https://www.stavros.io/posts/spamnesty-waste-spammers-time/
======
CodeMage
I'm just waiting for someone to hook this sort of stuff to some kind of
machine learning system, to learn and adapt and come up with new replies. And
some 100 years hence we'll be explaining to kids that the singularity arose
out of people's annoyance with spammers ;)

~~~
Hortinstein
I think that this or something very similar was a plot point in Neal
Stephenson's Anathem. Cannot find a good reference, but it was pretty
entertaining.

~~~
CodeMage
The Artificial Inanity and bogons, yes.

------
hellbanner
See also, The AI that wastes telemarketers time
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13013327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13013327)

And this script that plays what sounds like an old man losing his memory:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

~~~
desireco42
How can I get Lenny? :) That is awesome.

These is how to use it: Transfer, conference, or forward your telemarketing
calls to 1-347-514-7296

Can't wait to try this out.

~~~
wincy
Doesn't work on cell phones.

~~~
criddell
I've always wondered why smartphone apps don't have better access to the
telephone portion of the device. Why is it so difficult to do something as
simple as recording calls? It would be neat if I could get apps to change my
voice or encrypt the audio.

~~~
coldpie
I don't know if this is why, but there are a bunch of laws and stuff about
what you can and can't do on a telephone. For example, many states have
limitations on who can legally record a phone conversation, with or without
various forms of consent. Maybe phone manufacturers don't want to facilitate
easily breaking those confusing laws.

~~~
criddell
They don't seem to mind people using the phone when they drive and that's also
illegal in many jurisdictions.

~~~
jstandard
They do mind, there just isn't a clear cut of a solution they can force
someone to put into code. You can't reliably detect if the phone is being used
by the driver or by a passenger.

Without being able to make that distinction, it's nearly impossible to force
phone software makers to write rules preventing "illegal" phone use in
situations where it is illegal.

Instead, they punish using verifiable methods such as direct observation (cop
sees you doing it).

The situation may be similar for recording calls (I'm not familiar with exact
laws in this area), but I'm assuming there are also privacy restrictions in
calling which lead to the software restrictions.

------
orf
This is great and seems to work, check out this thread:

[https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/hszegufh/](https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/hszegufh/)

~~~
benibela
I can't believe I just wasted time reading voluntarily through a thread of
spam mails

~~~
StavrosK
You have been foiled by my evil plan, my goal was to sell you penis
enlargement pills all along.

------
CapitalistCartr
The problem with Spam has always been the minuscule cost of doing it. If the
cost can rise above the profit, spam could become unattractive. Imagine if
spam attracted a sudden swarm of bots, just as a new email addy attracts
spammers now.

~~~
ptero
And bots could do pretty well there. I recently read an article (cannot find
it; but it may have been even linked from here) which explained the benefit of
poor grammar in the spam (i.e., they want to put off more knowledgeable users
as the cost of the follow on emails is significantly higher).

El cheapo bots have pretty basic English skills which can help them fit
naturally into the spam target patterns.

~~~
notahacker
The paper you're referring to is probably this one:
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-
do-...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-
scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/)

The same logic that favours using an opening gambit that scares off all but
the most unworldly of people works against using bots for the followup
conversation. You don't want to finally find someone that genuinely believes
that a random central African stranger might want to split $138,400,000 with
them and has funds ready to send only for your bot to fail the Turing test by
misunderstanding their question about how to pay the deposit.

Also, anyone smart and knowledgeable enough to be able to write bots capable
of persuading exceptionally gullible people to part with their money is
probably capable of moving to the next level and going after the slightly-less
gullible, who are more numerous and richer.

It's also probably a bit flattering to the average scammer to assume the flaws
in their patter are a deliberate filter pattern though. They're just as likely
to open with a highly plausible (probably copied) offer of high value second
hand goods on a listings website that probably attracts dozens or replies and
then respond to each of those genuine expressions of interest from people
willing and able to pay with badly-written response(s) that conflict with the
detail of the original ad, not to mention totally forgetting that little old
Scottish ladies don't have email addresses registered in the name of Nigerian
men.

~~~
jerf
"It's also probably a bit flattering to the average scammer to assume the
flaws in their patter are a deliberate filter pattern though."

It doesn't have to be deliberate. It probably evolved. If worse spelling and
grammar work better than correct spelling and grammar, then even if no spammer
ever consciously says "Ah, I need to make this crappier", the spams will
evolve to be crappy.

Moreover, while our brains in this discussion are taking cognitive shortcuts
and putting spams on a "correct <-> crappy" single dimensional continuum, the
reality is probably even more complicated, and it's actually _specific_
crappiness that works better than others. For instance, I could hypothesize
that it's not just typos, but typos that the recipient plausibly believe are
the result of a non-native speaker from the relevant country. (I say
"plausibly believe" rather than whether the non-native English is truly
representative of the relevant country, because that's what matters.) That's
an obvious possibility; more subtle things are possible and probably even
likely. And again, the spams will evolve into those more subtle possibilities
and exploit them even if no individual participant is sitting there and trying
to deliberately figure out the best spams to send... which is, obviously,
almost certainly untrue as well. And whoever is sitting down to write The
Perfect Spam is probably doing so with a lot more data and a lot less scruples
than you or I would apply to the problem.

I've often thought one of our best anti-spam defenses is the sheer mailbox
stuffing quantity of them. Even the best crafted spam about how I won the
lottery I never entered looks a lot less plausible the thousandth time I
receive it.

~~~
notahacker
Occam's razor implies that if the people originating the scams mostly are
based in central Africa (true) and display the specific crappy spelling
patterns and linguistic quirks of many other moderately-educated central
Africans using the internet for non-nefarious purposes (also true) one needn't
assume that there's any particular process that leads people to write like
their compatriots. Especially not when similar imperfections betray their
attempts to masquerade as a Scottish widow selling their husband's canal boat
or Australian trader that wants to buy your product if you'll send him the
import tax.

I'm also little inclined towards scepticism there's much evolutionary
optimization going on when the standard email scam format hasn't even adapted
to get around now unbiquitous standard webmail spam filters, which are
essentially orthogonal to the gullibility of the account owner.

Besides, wouldn't an evolutionary process that wasn't a conscious attempt to
avoid generating false positives (or slavish copying by people that don't
really analyse in much depth) tend to optimise for reusing the emails that
generated more responses rather than less?

------
underyx
That is reasonable, but do you think you can go into more detail about your
main product? What is it about, exactly?

~~~
StavrosK
Hello my beloved friend,

I hope you and your family are healthy and happy. As I have detailed in my
previous correspondence, my offering to you is a way to waste spammers' time
by making them reply to emails. I am sure your esteemed self would have great
use for such a service. Please wire $1500 to my account for attorney's fees.

Thank you and God Bless,

Stavros

~~~
nercht12
Hello Stavros, I'm not sure I understand. Could you go into more detail?

*In all seriousness though (lol): You could have different types of personalities, depending on the email address of the person who doesn't want the spam. Like someone pretending mnesty.com is their work address but is still treating it like a personal message. That way the spammer will disregard the fact that the reply email isn't the same as the original. EDIT: Nevermind, I see you said you did that already... I think. ... Help?

~~~
StavrosK
It's too hard to write generalities, I'm afraid. You can only write about 10
different sentences before you start to repeat yourself (or at least I can't
do it). Feel free to send me sentences for me to add!

~~~
failrate
This is amazing. Looping in my supervisor. [add a second email agent to
thread. The two email agents will fork the email chain for the spammer and ask
similar questions, hopefully wasting more of their time.

------
estefan
Someone posted about Lenny [1] the other day. I've had fun listening to him on
youtube waste telemarketers' time.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nO...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nOGWrXlhl-
i_3g)

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Lenny is great. My 11-year-old and I play the Lenny game sometimes -- one of
us is telemarketer, the other plays Lenny. Lenny is a brilliant piece of
software. I just worry that eventually most call centers will be onto Lenny.
Already some telemarketers recognize him. Luckily, as AI and voice recognition
improve, more such systems will come online for the amusement of youtube
audiences and to thwart telemarketers and scammers.

------
jasonkostempski
I'm guessing the emails this generates will become flagged as spam themselves.
Do spammers use spam filters too or would that prevent them from getting
replies?

~~~
CapacitorSet
Spam filters could do very little, because it's almost impossible to tell
whether a conversation was run by a bot - and it's outright _impossible_ to do
so for a single response.

However, you raise an interesting point: blacklists could reasonably be put
into place. I'll make a merge request to use Spintax.

~~~
StavrosK
If you do, I would definitely be interested in that, Spintax seems like a very
easy way to add some variation.

------
aedron
Very nice, and a great test bed for AI code. Lots of low hanging fruit, like
follow-ups to specific branches of conversation, extracting certain
information from the spammers replies to make the answers look more real, etc.

Someone should organize a competition to see who can create the longest
running conversation (or the funniest one).

~~~
StavrosK
> Very nice, and a great test bed for AI code.

Yeah, that's an interesting aspect of it for me. I'll have to clean up the
code a bit, because it's very "weekend project" quality, but it's an
interesting way forward.

------
michaelhoffman
I had a friend who tried messing with spammers and then was hit with a massive
DDOS.

~~~
probably_wrong
Was your friend working for Blue Frog [1]?

I always thought it interesting that no one seriously tried to replicate a
tool so good at its job that spammers were actually scared.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog)

~~~
michaelhoffman
No. He set up some one-off script to annoy people who spammed him. One of the
spammers didn't take to it.

------
brightball
I love this. I've actually presented on the concept before - more so about
ensuring that people targeting your user base have to waste a lot of time
without realizing it by doing things like shadow bans weeks before actually
"detecting and cancelling their account" but this is a perfect example of the
concept.

Everything, even spam, is based on ROI.

------
gamerDude
Have you thought of adding in a check in if they haven't responded after a
week?

Perhaps, "Hi there, I thought we were really making progress, but I haven't
heard from you for a week. Is there still a chance I could get in on this
great opportunity?"

~~~
StavrosK
Yes, but right now it's very event-driven (each email triggers a new one), so
it would be more complicated for little benefit (given that spammers wouldn't
reply anyway, they only stop replying when they think you're wasting their
time, and that wouldn't change with an additional email).

------
joelthelion
Really cool. Two remarks:

1) If lots of people start using this, spammers might learn to avoid wasting
time with Mnesty's CEO. Having a few more fake companies would help.

2) The bot could probably be made a lot smarter with some natural language
processing. But it seems to fill its purpose pretty well already. I think this
just shows how desperate for leads spammers are.

~~~
StavrosK
1) Yeah, there's support for multiple domains, but I have no domains right now
:) If anyone wants to donate one, please open an issue!

2) Exactly, they're so desperate for leads that they will spend lots of time
chasing someone who doesn't appear to make lots of sense.

~~~
cryptarch
I have a few domains you could borrow? I can at the least offer you 5 domains
for half a year, shoot me an email if you're interested.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I've now read so much spam, I can't help but see it everywhere! ;-)

~~~
cryptarch
You too can be the proud borrower of 5 domains! Just shoot me an email at
cryptarch+employee-us-bigcorp-com@gmail.com.

jk

------
djhworld
How is the bot tailoring the replies, for example

> Hello, I have wired the funds you asked for. Could we please proceed to the
> next stage? Daniel Wong CEO, MNesty, LLC

Is that a canned response? This happens later on in the thread (does it
recognise that the topic of the conversation is "funds" rather than say
"product")

~~~
StavrosK
It has various categories of replies, which right now you can specify when you
forward a message (it sends you a management URL back). Later on, when I have
enough data, I'll do some simple ML to have it pick a most likely category as
a default.

Each category comes with its own set of responses, but you can see where the
category changed because the bot will start talking about a product and then
switch to talking about funds.

The code is here if you want to see:

[https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty/](https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty/)

~~~
notahacker
It'd be more effective if it didn't re-use responses later in the chain
(unless it'd totally run out of alternatives). Although, arguably, it's
funnier when the spammers/scammers do continue to find new ways to reply to
the same couple of questions.

~~~
Tepix
To improve negotiations the bot should extract money amounts from the mail and
start negotiating (and never stop).

------
oelmekki
Ahah, this is fun :) But please someone, let google know this exists. I just
had a forward refused by gmail because "it contains viruses", and I realize
I've forwarded 5 spams before that. I would not want google to think I'm
"actually" sending spams :D

~~~
StavrosK
Google refused because the forward contained viruses? Hmm, maybe if you strip
the link?

~~~
oelmekki
Yep. That's ok, I have forwarded plenty enough :)

What surprises me is that a mail with viruses is in my mailbox (my spambox,
granted). I guess it was not know it was a virus when it was received.

------
dagurp
> Spammers will usually realize they’re talking to a bot (or at least to
> someone who isn’t interested or not going to give them any money) after
> around 3-5 messages, but some have sent up to 15 messages before giving up
> in frustration.

So it passed the Turing test?

~~~
StavrosK
No, the Turing test requires that the interviewer not be trying to extract
money from the interviewees :P

------
jvdh
Finally an actually useful application for AI! No perfect result is required
and this is also not something you want actual humans to do.

------
yekim
[https://spa.mnesty.com/](https://spa.mnesty.com/) = server not found.

Anyone else seeing this?

~~~
StavrosK
It has something to do with (the move to) Cloudflare. Refresh once or twice,
it will load.

[https://www.timetaco.com/jaspsa/](https://www.timetaco.com/jaspsa/)

~~~
StavrosK
It turns out that some DNS servers cached the old nameservers and are now
failing to resolve those. It's unfortunate, but all we can do is wait for the
cache to expire :(

~~~
contras1970
Did you forget step 4 from [https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/run-server.html#move-
zone](https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/run-server.html#move-zone) ?

~~~
StavrosK
No, it looks like Namecheap stops serving the old records when you change
nameservers.

------
breakingcups
In my days we called this an autobaiter :)

------
pingou
Nicely done. I worked a bit on the same concept, mine is not as good as yours,
and it's an android app. If anybody wants to have a look, I'm really opened to
suggestions.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.scampong.s...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.scampong.scampong&hl=en)

Funny thing is that most of the people who downloaded it came from Nigeria and
seemed to think that it was a tool that allowed them to scam people. It was
quite funny when they put their own contributions and then one of them was
talking to a real scammer trying to scam him. Had to delete the thread cause
it didn't make much sense though.

------
blitzo
This could works in short run as long as this type of service stay as niche
and not too popular. Spammers always, always have a creative work around it. I
imagined a counter measure from them by build a bot detector that will spam
back the spambot and one hell of continuos email loop doesn't do any good to
our internet traffic.

------
amga_
We need a Chrome extension for this!! I would create it myself .. but there's
not any public API.

~~~
StavrosK
What sort of API would you need? What do you want the extension to do? Just
show conversations?

------
vytis
I've tried forwarding a spam email from Apple Mail, but I got a response that
it didn't work out. This is the raw email message I sent -
[http://pastebin.com/qNwT04my](http://pastebin.com/qNwT04my)

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you, it looks like your mail client adds forward headers in a way
Spamnesty doesn't understand yet. I'll try to fix it soon.

EDIT: Can you add an issue to the tracker with the forward header verbatim so
I don't forget?

------
jnaddef
There is one major problem : the answers are sent immediatly after receiving
the email.

This is obviously suspicious, considering most of the mails require at least a
few minutes of reading + time to write the mail.

I guess adding a delay would improve the bot's credibility by a lot!

~~~
StavrosK
It actually has a random delay of 1-8 hours, which shows in the timestamp. It
only sends the first email right away, because it presumably took you some
time to forward it to Spamnesty.

~~~
rrauenza
What are you using for the event management? I wonder if using celery and
rabbitmq or redis as the queue would help simplify things.

With it, you just schedule asynchronous tasks in the future ... you don't have
to manage the event queue.

~~~
StavrosK
The box these are running on is already pretty full (it's where I keep all my
side-projects, and it's got around eight running on it now), so I'm trying to
keep it lean. Features definitely get cut on a cost/effectiveness ratio.

------
mallamanis
Using machine learning like this
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869.pdf)
would be fun for this and avoid(?) canned responses...

------
enraged_camel
I forwarded a single spam email to Spamnesty at 8:46 AM today. Since then, it
has been spamming me saying it received the email...

Timestamps:

8:46 AM - initial receipt email

8:56 AM

9:11 AM

10:11 AM

12:11 AM

The conversations linked in the subsequent receipt emails lack the spammer's
email. They only contain the response from the Spamnesty bot.

~~~
StavrosK
Yes, this is a known issue:

[https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty/issues/6](https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty/issues/6)

Can you post the IDs of the emails you received so I can look into the issue?

~~~
enraged_camel
OK, I replied to the issue with the links. :)

------
return0
I usually just pretend that i just killed someone to get the money they asked
for.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Lol. I used to bait spammers as a hobby, and after a few exchanges with one,
I'd tell them how lucky I was that I had been identified as the real owner of
$324 million in a lost government account. That I had to have been the
luckiest person in the world, because not only that, just last week, I won the
national Nigerian lottery, and the week before that, a distant great-aunt from
Nigeria had named me sole heir in her will!

------
lordnacho
This is not a bad idea. Perhaps if the major email providers had bots that did
this sort of thing, spammers would be overwhelmed with responses, with the
tiny proportion of real fish lost in the mix.

------
haylem
I've said it in the other thread where you mentioned it the other day, and
I'll say it again: this is an awesome service!

And thanks so much for sharing the source on GitLab to reproduce it.

Really great work!

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you!

------
iopq
I forwarded an email and got a response, but
[https://spa.mnesty.com/](https://spa.mnesty.com/) doesn't load for me

~~~
StavrosK
There appears to be some problem with DNS after I moved to Cloudflare. Keep
refreshing, it will work, but sometimes people get NXDOMAIN/SERVFAIL when
resolving.

------
fiatjaf
I have never understood what were the goals of these messages. People saying
they have a fund of millions. Is everything arranged for me to send money to
them? Simpĺe as that?

~~~
hga
One of the goals is to find someone who'll fall for such a scheme. If it was
more plausible, they'd waste time on someone who'd end up not pulling the
trigger when they realized it was too likely to be a scam.

~~~
jpalomaki
Once spammers start using bots to carry conversation, this might change. If
bots can handle part of the communication, it probably makes sense to start
planning more subtle scams.

~~~
conjectures
I'd assume they are already.

------
fiatjaf
What happened to hashcash proposals to email protocols?

~~~
chriswarbo
The problem with hashcash for email is that there's no way for the sender and
receiver to negotiate the amount of work to be proved, so they must correctly
guess how much to perform/require. The most sensible requirement to guess is
zero, since _all_ existing email is sent without any proof of work, and the
value of interoperability is higher than blocking spam. After all, if you're
willing to lose interoperability, you can block 100% of spam by just not using
email at all!

Note that it may be possible to have _servers_ negotiate an amount of work to
perform, but having someone else (the server) perform the work defeats the
point of the system. The _client_ must be told to do the work, but it's a core
feature of email that it's not realtime: messages can be composed offline, and
queued up by servers, so by the time a "needs more work" response is received,
there's no way for the server to send a message back to the client.

~~~
mikeash
Could the work requirement be advertised as part of the destination's MX
record or something? I know that in theory you're supposed to be able to send
the message to your upstream server and let it worry about how to deliver, but
in practice it seems like these days you can count on being able to look up
the target's DNS info.

Another problem is finding a quantity of work which is high enough to stop
spam, but low enough not to stop legitimate traffic. You want people to be
able to send email from their RPiZero or original iPhone, but stop spammers
who may have massive botnets, or at least decent PCs.

~~~
chriswarbo
I can't think of a way to make this work with email, but I do think a proof of
work like hashcash would be useful for Web APIs instead of using API keys:

\- Give a 402 reponse if hashcash isn't included or isn't enough, with a link
to a price URL

\- GETting a price URL may return different values depending on identifying
information like IP address, user agent, etc.

\- Prices can be adjusted based on server load, whether we recognise this
agent as malicious or benevolent, etc.

\- Different types of request can have different prices, e.g. GETting a
specific resource could be cheaper than searching or performing some expensive
computation.

There would also need to be a mechanism to avoid replays, which would make
things slightly less RESTful. I haven't thought of anything more useful here
than an increasing request ID.

~~~
mikeash
I've done a crappy implementation for my blog to fight spammy comments. It
works OK, probably more because it's a totally custom thing that isn't worth
time for spammers to fight, rather than because it's actually effective.

The way I did it is:

\- When the user focuses in a comment field, the page makes a request to the
server asking for initial parameters.

\- The server returns the number of leading zeroes required, the number of
distinct hashes it needs, and a salt to use. (This is just a constant in my
code right now, but could be varied based on client specifics.)

\- The page then crunches on the work as the user types their comment. The
submit button is disabled until it's complete.

\- The proof of work is submitted to the server along with the comment. The
server then checks to see if it's good and accepts or rejects. A properly
working client should never be rejected (since it fetches the required
parameters in advance) so the rejection doesn't have to be too fancy.

\- Replays are prevented by storing the salts in a database, and deleting them
once they're used for a comment.

I changed the standard hashcash technique a bit by requiring the client to
submit multiple distinct hashes. Requiring only one hash works fine, but
results in a lot of variance in how long it takes to compute the proof of
work. You might tune it for an average of 30 seconds, but a decent percentage
of clients will get it in 1 second, or will take 60 seconds. By, for example,
requiring 7 fewer leading zeroes but requiring 128 distinct hashes, you get
the same average but with a lot less variance. You can also display a semi-
accurate progress indicator this way. The downside, of course, is that you
have to send more data and the server has to do some extra work to verify.

~~~
fiatjaf
Is that code public and in Python/Go/Javascript?

~~~
mikeash
My web site is a hacked-together thing that's been gradually accumulating
since the late 90s, so it's kind of ugly. The hashcash code is not very
modular, either.

If you'd like to see it anyway, I pulled out the relevant parts here:

[https://gist.github.com/mikeash/daf02b6cc3017560f930515c3c17...](https://gist.github.com/mikeash/daf02b6cc3017560f930515c3c17af43)

The comment-inline.js file is directly embedded in the HTML for the comments
area, and is the glue code between the actual UI and the hashcash computation
code. The hashcash.js file is where all the client-side work happens, and it
handles the actual hashing, making multiple attempts, checking to see if an
attempt produced a good result, and such. Then commentsubmit.py handles the
server side by returning hashcash parameters when requested, and checking the
provided hashcash for validity when submitting.

I have a brief blog post about it here, which you can also use to see the
system in action:

[https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/testing-hashcash-based-
anti-s...](https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/testing-hashcash-based-anti-spam-
measures.html)

If you have any questions, comments, or criticisms, please feel free to get in
touch.

------
waterpowder2
Don't you think spammers will react like antibiotics? Getting better at it
while we're building better bots?

~~~
StavrosK
All we need to do is make bots that are more convincing than their victims.
Can't be too hard, since they prey on the least savvy people.

------
jayess
Wow. How can I set a filter so that all email marked as spam by gmail is
automatically forwarded to your service?

~~~
StavrosK
Probably don't do that, I'm not sure I can handle that much spam. Mailgun
would begin charging for that much email, for one (I'm on their free tier
now).

------
jnaddef
Is there any way to have multi-language support?

------
Myce
Can't you connect it to a chatbot api?

------
mxuribe
This is pretty awesome!

------
amga_
Love it, good work!

------
secfirstmd
This is hilarious

------
bbcbasic
This needs to send fake name address and bank account details when
rerequested. That's where the threads would start to get more interesting.

Another idea is to send two spammers responses to each other.

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sean_patel
I am surprised (and a little embarassed for my race) to see so many Indian
names in the About page of [http://www.mlooper.com](http://www.mlooper.com)

Most appear to be "Web Developers". Ex: See this Conversation:
[http://www.mlooper.com/conversations/2912/](http://www.mlooper.com/conversations/2912/)

Is this common? Do a lot of you get spammed with Indian companies /
individuals claiming to do web development? I have received a few, and the
funny thing is, NONE of the ones I received even had a Web Site?! How does
that work?!!

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ocdtrekkie
This seems like a noble endeavor which will be useful (albeit under different
names over time, I assume) right up until the spammers start using bots to
hold their ends of conversations, to make their own operations more efficient.

~~~
joelthelion
If they do so they will likely lose the very few leads that actually earn them
money. Remember, for them it's a real business.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Eh, machine learning is advancing enough that the sort of people that would
fall for Nigerian prince emails could be conceivably convinced they're talking
to a real person.

