
Two years spent spamming spammers back - beweinreich
https://medium.com/@beweinreich/two-years-spamming-spammers-back-2e734ce9593c#.djy3sqs70
======
kalleboo
This is a great idea. Waste the spammer's time and it's no longer worth it.

The phone version of this is Lenny[0], a set of audio files/Asterisk script
which pretends to be a senile, doddering old man (who has a duck problem).
There's a reddit user who runs a number you can forward your sales calls to,
and he'll pick out the best ones and put on YouTube[1]. The record is keeping
a caller on the phone for 56 minutes.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nO...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nOGWrXlhl-
i_3g) (edit: if you sort the user's videos by most popular, the top one is
something quite amazing)

~~~
spacehome
In addition the telemarketers, I wasted a bunch of time listening to Lenny.
This is amazing! Thanks!

Edit: I love his ducks

~~~
spacehome
If I let one of these "Windows Technical Department" guys into my Parallels
Windows VM running on OS X, am I exposing myself to any danger?

------
grecy
> _Imagine if this type of thing happened in real-life. You walk out the door
> in the morning and you’re immediately attacked by Parul, Kevin, and Amelie._

I laughed out loud at this, because it's exactly what I'm experiencing now in
West Africa.

Street vendors are aggressive about selling whatever they have, and they seem
to assume I want it - almost like I owe it to them to buy it - I'm not sure if
it's because I'm White, or it's just their standard procedure for everyone
that walks by.

On my 3 minute walk to the local store, I get a minimum of 10 people in my
face, trying to sell me cell phone recharge cards, peanuts and limes. Every
single day I say no thanks, every single day they try again, sometimes even on
the walk back.

I've tried ignoring them or not responding at all, and that usually makes it
worse - they'll yell louder and louder (assuming I have not heard), hiss, make
a kissing noise, and eventually put themselves in my way so I'm forced to
acknowledge them.

Amazingly, even when I do buy something, and I clearly have it in my hand (a
bunch of carrots for example), every single street vendor selling carrots will
still try with 100% effort to sell me carrots.

~~~
bigdubs
Obviously not the same but I've had this happen in a couple places and I just
say "FUCK OFF" as loud as I can and get visibly upset and they leave me alone
after that.

~~~
grecy
....That's a horrible way to react. I wonder what these people think about you
and your country of origin. You are, after all, an ambassador for your country
when ever you are outside it.

~~~
bigtunacan
This response just shows you are unfamiliar with these types of encounters or
at the very least accepted behavior in such situations.

In one area I used to live in the general "proper" behavior when you are
approached by street vendors or beggars was essentially 3 phase.

1) Ignore unless you intend to buy or give. This means you do not reply to
anything they say or even make eye contact.

2) Engage verbally or even just visually. This means you intend to buy or
give. Now you will be pressured and given an aggressive sell/ask.

3) If it was a mistaken engagement or you don't reach an agreement you MUST
aggressively exit. This often means yelling, possibly swearing, and in some
cases even putting your hands on someone and even verbally threatening in bad
situations.

I spent a significant enough amount of my childhood growing up in this type of
culture. My wife was always from a small city. When we later moved I explained
to her that this was a big cultural difference than she was used to and the
expected way to behave in these situations.

Being from a small city she thought this was disrespectful and continually
made things, putting it lightly, more difficult for us.

Eventually it actually put us in a situation that escalated to being
dangerous. A seller that she responded to with small talk became very angry
that she had wasted his time. He then got in her face, put a hand on her
shoulder and started screaming at her.

At that point I ran over, pushed the man off of her and said, "She doesn't
fucking want anything. Now get the fuck out of our faces before I have to kick
your ass."

After that happened she finally took my advice.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Where did you grow up where that's the norm? It sounds, uh, interesting.

~~~
mixmastamyk
It's quite common across the "third world," sorry can't think up a better term
right now. But I've encountered very aggressive touts from India to Bahia,
Brazil.

------
wanderr
Back in the olden days, when the ping of death causing a windows BSOD was a
thing, if I was online when I got spam I would immediately look for the
spammer's ip and send them a ping of death. I could tell it often worked
because then I'd get the same spam again 10 minutes later, so I'd do it to
them again, then I'd get spammed again and ping them again until eventually
they gave up.

I assume their mass mailing program would just start at the top of an email
list and send them one by one, without tracking progress, so when the computer
crashed they would have to start over. After a few crashes in a row hopefully
the spammer would blame the spam sending program for crashing the computer and
give up, maybe even demand a refund from whoever sold it to them.

------
titomc
One spammer realised that he is talking to a bot and asks the bot about the
three laws.

[http://www.mlooper.com/conversations/3072](http://www.mlooper.com/conversations/3072)

~~~
maaaats
This kinda rocked my view on spammers. It's easy to group them together and
have a lot of prejudice, but clearly they come in all kinds of forms.

~~~
tempestn
I would say that this sort of service spam is generally on a different tier
from your classic 419 garbage or whatever. Usually those outfits will have
their most competent person dealing with email to rope in new customers.

Amusing aside: I once hired one of these Indian web dev outsourcing firms to
create a super simple form for one of our sites. (Not from a spam email, which
I certainly wouldn't want to reward, but probably a similar outfit.) We could
have done it in house, but I wanted to see how viable it would be to farm out
simple, nicely encapsulated work when it came up.

Their failures were many and varied, but the most hilarious was when one of
them wanted to givea section of form an orange border. (For some reason. The
site's colour scheme was mostly greens with no orange to be seen.) Anyway, he
decided the best way to do this was to find an enormous png of a sunset
(multiple megabytes), and repeat a small strip of the top 10px or so as a
background image in a div behind the area. I'm still not sure whether I was
being trolled, or if incompetence on that scale is actually possible.
(Normally I would assume it _must_ be the former, but given their myriad other
screw-ups, I'm not entirely sure.)

Every time I would write to complain about something utterly idiotic they'd
done, they would wholeheartedly agree, share in my amazement at how foolish it
was, and assure me that that junior programmer had been removed, and someone
more senior would be taking over the project. (I went through a couple of
levels of seniority, then eventually gave up when the Senior Lead Architect or
whoever delivered the orange border monstrosity.)

Anyway, the most competent person in that company was definitely the one
sending the emails.

~~~
titomc
I will admit that I have done this (bg repeat) too, on my lycos,geocities
sites.

------
chrissnell
This reminds me of a script I wrote about a decade ago to deal with phishing
sites. My script generated first and last names, email addresses, passwords,
and credit card numbers that actual passed checksum validation. It would
submit these fake entries to a phishing form just as fast as the remote end
would take them, polluting their database/inbox/whatever with thousands of
bogus submissions. Besides wasting their time and resources, it also
smokescreened any legitimate submissions that might have come through.

------
ortusdux
Reminds me of the cities that setup robocallers to cut down on illegal signs.

[http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-07-19/news/os-
litte...](http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-07-19/news/os-litter-signs-
robocalls-20120719_1_sign-violators-illegal-signs-sign-scofflaws)

------
Exuma
This is great, and would be even more brilliant if it could integrate some
sort of markov chain, like
[https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator](https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator)

I'd love to see it have random answers that are unique based on the question.
Then you make it a global service that hundreds of thousands of people can
forward messages to, and then you waste spammers time en masse.

~~~
chipperyman573
The problem with a markov chain is that the sentences it generates are often
nonsensical. A markov chain is useful for predicting a few words out of a
sentence a human already has generated, but not an entire sentence.

------
brightball
These guys operate on an ROI basis. If you waste their time you decrease their
ROI.

Great tool.

~~~
hackbinary
This is why I tend to take spam phone calls for double glazing and PPI. I
talked to a guy for an hour once. My strategy to be the affable fool.

~~~
dhimes
Tom Mabe did this and recorded it- released a hilarious cd

~~~
dmoy
Is that the guy with the fake crime scene?

~~~
nickpsecurity
Best one ever:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmKtS-k12b0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmKtS-k12b0)

------
koytch
Effing hilarious. Some years ago I spent a few days writing to a 'Russian
bride'. It became instantly clear all replies were scripted, there was no
connection at all with what I said (The full text of 'I, Robot'? Oh, what
interesting things you do…). So I'd say many if not most of the spam scenarios
are automated and the whole thing becomes too meta.

------
MaxLeiter
If you find this funny, I highly recommend this TED talk: "This is what
happens when you reply to a spam email"

[https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_when_you_reply_to_spam_email)

------
chrischen
It would be great if someone could implement this as a free public service,
using neural algorithms to generate responses.

~~~
Waterluvian
I agree. But I have to say I had a chuckle that the second half of your
sentence looks like hipster mode to me.

~~~
chrischen
There are services for this already, actually, such as wit.ai and api.ai.
Wit.ai is free.

------
sztwiorok
Great idea!

I'm sure that GitHub community will help to make it even better

[https://github.com/beweinreich/mlooper](https://github.com/beweinreich/mlooper)

~~~
dorianm
The logic made me laugh :)

    
    
        def random_reply
          reply = Reply.order("RAND()").first.content
    
          # if the conversation is getting long, start injecting hipster sentences to the end...
          if self.conversation.emails.count > 10
            reply << " #{Faker::Hipster.sentence}"
          end
          return reply
        end
    

P.S.: It's a simple Rails app

------
verroq
Should just connect two or more spammers together and let them offer their
products to each other.

~~~
Lasher
Oh that would be awesome, maintain a list of previous spammer emails then
generate the responses from a random one of those.

------
cxmcc
Love it! For physical spam mails with business reply envelope, I always fold
everything back into the envelope and send it back.

~~~
6502nerdface
Never thought of that, good call. They presumably pay for the reply postage,
reducing their ROI.

~~~
dingaling
Just remember to tear-off anything that looks personally identifiable (
address, reference numbers etc ).

There used to be a trick in the UK of attaching reply envelopes to bricks and
putting them back into the postal system, hoping that the spammer would be
charged by weight, but Royal Mail put an end to that.

~~~
xenadu02
Slightly OT but that's because one of the biggest customers of postal services
are direct marketers. By sending a brick you're abusing the system and
harassing the real customers.

~~~
thingexplainer
Junk mail wastes more resources in a day than spam ever will. Spam should be
legal and junk mail should not be.

------
wojcikstefan
Aren't most of these spam emails automated anyway? If it's just two bots
talking, you're not really wasting anybody's time/resources.

------
mmwako
I was just wondering: if every person did this with the spam they get (or
maybe automatized by Gmail), spammers would be overflowed with bot answers to
their spam emails, and would not be able to differentiate between a potential
victim's response, and all the bot replys. This has the potential to actually
SOLVE the problem of spam. Think this could work?

~~~
styrophone
A lot of spam doesn't expect a response and only cares about link impressions.

------
eljimmy
I once made the mistake of sending a joke reply to a spammer from my
legitimate email.

Turned out they pulled my phone number from the WHOIS info on my domain which
I can only assume they sold to some marketing companies as I received about a
dozen cold calls from various "web agencies" from the states. A lot of them
were relentless, calling me repeatedly and leaving voicemails.

------
codingdave
Sure, great idea, funny and clever and all that.

But I disagree with the idea that inboxes are sacred, and disagree with the
attitude of "how dare people send marketing to me!" Fraudulent spam is one
thing. Plain old marketing or sales cold calls, though... you know people are
going to do it. It is their job. And I'd much rather get emails than I can
quickly delete and ignore vs. phone calls. And once in a while, someone
actually hits on a service that is useful to me.

So I don't think the real-life scenario of people badgering you outside the
door is accurate. The better metaphor would be one comparing your inbox to
your actual mailbox. Sure, junk mail is annoying and most of it gets thrown
out. But sometimes that restaurant down the street does send coupons.

~~~
wpietri
You are welcome to disagree with the notion for _your_ inbox. If you want
spam, godspeed. But other people get to decide for their inboxes.

And as to this: "You know people are going to do it. It is their job." This
always puzzles me. So what?

Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing
their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job. That people have
found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not mean I have to
support them in any way.

In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to
manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's utility
or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people they
attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.

~~~
thingexplainer
> You are welcome to disagree with the notion for your inbox.

And we did, by implementing Bayesian spam filters, not be making spam illegal.
It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet.

> Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing
> their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job.

These are differences of kind, not degree.

> That people have found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not
> mean I have to support them in any way.

Feel free to spend your money how you please, but do we really have to write
it into the law?

Why is junk mail legal but spam is not? It's because Congress could understand
the mechanics of junk mail, not because junk mail has any sort of moral or
societal value lacking in spam.

> In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to
> manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's
> utility or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people
> they attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.

This is a pretty cynical view of marketing. Do you work somewhere with a
marketing department? Is that what they do?

~~~
wpietri
> It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet.

Yeah, if something is hard we should just give up right away and save time.

> These are differences of kind, not degree.

All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are mostly
negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable. All of them are
also partly or totally illegal in many jurisdictions because society
recognizes that negative-sum issue.

> Why is junk mail legal but spam is not?

Junk mail has a much higher ratio of production/delivery cost to recipient
cost. It's societally much less of a problem.

> This is a pretty cynical view of marketing.

I said "most sales and advertising" for a reason. There are other ways to
market things. And it's not impossible to do advertising or sales usefully.
It's just not the bulk of what goes on.

But if you'd like to check, see what gets salespeople paid. Is it when the
value is delivered or when the sale is made? You could also see how much ad
agencies do to test the value of products before they hype them. Or whether
they go back and make sure that they aren't giving purchasers the wrong
expectations.

~~~
thingexplainer
> Yeah, if something is hard we should just give up right away and save time.

You misunderstood me, and it is true that I did not speak plainly. The
Internet is a global resource which we cannot legislate because it isn't
something we have authority over. A counterargument might go, "so is the radio
spectrum, and we regulate that," and that is so, but I don't think you'd like
an Internet where it's illegal to send someone an email if there country
hasn't signed a treaty with your country (as it can be, simplistically, with
ham radio).

> All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are
> mostly negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable.

Pickpockets and hitmen are a drain on society in every conceivable way, but to
say you're being unfair to telemarketers is a bit of an understatement. When
they call trying to get me to fill up empty spaces on cruises so they don't
feel like ghost ships, they are offering me something that (if you squint and
pinch your nose) has value, and Carnival certainly sees value in what they're
doing. Who is getting fleeced here?

Are they in a line of work that I wouldn't be comfortable with? Yes they are,
but that doesn't make them the same as thieves and murderers. I can understand
not being interested in entertaining moral relativism, but a nuisance is just
not the same thing as a threat, and treating them as similar leads to poor
decisions.

> Junk mail has a much higher ratio of production/delivery cost to recipient
> cost. It's societally much less of a problem.

Which of these is an existential threat, receiving unsolicited sales pitches,
or running out of fossil fuels?

> I said "most sales and advertising" for a reason.

I said you were being very general, presumably I had a reason too.

> ...see what gets salespeople paid. Is it when the value is delivered or when
> the sale is made?

Don't salespeople deliver value to their employer when they make a sale? Isn't
it their job to make sales and engineer's (or whatever specialty's) job to
create whatever valuable thing will be delivered to the customer? Do you get
paid for things you don't do?

> You could also see how much ad agencies do to test the value of products
> before they hype them.

Is it the ad agency's job to make sure my Anker cable won't overvolt my
battery? Or is that the role of Anker and relevant regulators?

> Or whether they go back and make sure that they aren't giving purchasers the
> wrong expectations.

We can agree this is definitely their responsibility, and to forgo it would be
dishonest.

------
maouida
Gmail and other popular mail providers should implement something like this.

It would be a big step forward in spam fighting.

------
the_duke
Hilarious idea.

But one of the first things I would have coded is preventing the same message
to be sent again.

The examples are full of that.

~~~
maksimum
You could consider repeat messages as adding insult to injury. For example you
can see in the 24-message conversation with the SEO company, that repeat
messages seem to aggravate the spammers.

~~~
the_duke
Good point, I hadn't thought about that.

------
gus_massa
Can anyone forward an email to that address? :)

Do you have localized versions? [I'm from Argentina and Most of my spam is in
Spanish. I guess no. :( ]

------
robrenaud
There is kind of a interesting Turing test scenario for AI here. Design an AI
to maximize number of replies (or total text written) by the spammer. The
internet is vast and full of spammers, you'll never run out of real humans
providing responses to optimize your system.

------
abhianet
What happens if I send it a mail from an mlooper address? Can I get it to
setup an infinite loop?

------
Animats
The one for phones has been on HN before. This one for spam is nice, but not
yet smart enough. With more smarts and some understanding of the messages, it
could keep spammers going forever. It doesn't need to be very intelligent; it
just needs to get up to the Eliza level.

If it detects a spam related to search engine optimization, it should have a
list of about a hundred plausible questions it can ask on that subject, for
example. There aren't that many spammed subjects.

Most email spam, though, is promoting a link, and can't handle an email reply.
You'd need something smart enough to go to a web site and sign up with fake
credentials.

~~~
dcminter
When especially irritated by spam of this type I like to look up the isp
hosting their register link and then sign up on their site with its abuse@
details (or occasionally @localhost for a bit of variety). Every clog in the
gears help or at least it's cathartic to imagine so.

------
wdr1
Reminds me of the guy who set up an automated voice script on his landline to
thwart telemarketers:

[http://jollyrogertelephone.com/about/](http://jollyrogertelephone.com/about/)

------
TheOtherHobbes
Brilliant! But... of course some of the spammers are bots themselves.

------
Lxr
This is hilarious, I love it. I would also love to see this made into a public
service with some clever ML algorithms to keep the conversation going as long
as possible.

------
Dagwoodie
Based on the sample of 24 messages back and forth, it looks like the spammer
also had a reply bot because a lot of messages exactly the same canned
response.

------
kensai
The dude deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for this. Literally pacifying the
interwebs! :D

------
slinger
I'm laughing out loud with these MLooper conversations. Made my day :D

PS: Nice project btw

------
aomix
I thought spamd passive aggressively insulting spammers and tarpitting their
connections was a good effort at wasting their time. This is a big step up
from that.

------
partycoder
Two related funny stories if you have the time:

\- The 7 legged spider story.

\- The guy that tricked Nigerian spammers into acting the dead parrot sketch
from Monty Python

~~~
mastax
I looked up these links so I might as well paste them here:

Spider: [http://27bslash6.com/overdue.html](http://27bslash6.com/overdue.html)
Monty:
[http://www.419eater.com/html/bigman.htm](http://www.419eater.com/html/bigman.htm)

------
tamersalama
Great idea! This has the potential of reducing worldwide spam/scam if is
implemented by email service providers.

------
ndesaulniers
Please adapt this for technical recruiters!

------
imaginenore
Would be cool to have this in GMail.

------
sztwiorok
Great tool

Please share this on github. we will be able to add our sugestions to the list
of answers!

~~~
PudgePacket
The author gave the link in the article
[https://github.com/beweinreich/mlooper](https://github.com/beweinreich/mlooper).

~~~
sztwiorok
Thanks for it.

~~~
Thrillington
Mlooper?

------
GirlsCanCode
Spam doesn't bother me anymore, but unsolicited phone calls do. The majority
of phone calls that come in are not legitimate.

~~~
wofo
You should probably check Lenny out:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
That's great, is there an app that will do this, like put it down next to your
landline phone and let it answer for you?

~~~
kalleboo
If you look at the reddit sidebar there's a phone number you can forward to or
conference in

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I saw a SIP number. If there's a POTS number to forward to doesn't the
forwarder then pay for the call? With a local responder app there would be no
call charge - I don't want this enough to pay for half-hour international call
forwarding.

------
countryqt30
@ GOOGLE: BUILD THIS IN GMAIL! :)

------
qgaultier
brillant !

------
mooveprince
Made my day :)

------
tomrod
To connect the conversation to David Brin, futurologist, philosopher, and
author, this sounds an awful like the crystal spheres in _Existence_.

