A team from the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub in Sydney has developed a voicebot to combat the rise of phone scams.
Named Apate, after the Greek goddess of deceit, the bot aims to waste scammers’ time by engaging them in long, looping, and ultimately futile conversations.
Researchers applied machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to train the voicebot.
In doing so, they analyzed, extracted, and determined script patterns from over 100 scam calls.
From there, the team developed a conversation pattern to drag out those conversations for as long as possible – engaging scammers in numerous rounds of interaction.
It then trained the voicebot on this information and applied voice cloning technology so the bot could adopt a particular persona, emotion, and language.
As such, the scammer makes fewer engagements as they’re kept on the hook by seemingly promising but ultimately pointless bot conversations.
Dali Kaafar, a Professor and Executive Director at Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub, hopes the innovation will bust the business models of the scammers.
"As long as the scammer is convinced Apate is a potential victim, Apate will keep the conversation going," said Kaafar on LinkedIn.
Should a large proportion of scam calls be directed to Apate, much of a scammer's time would be spent with the bots without profit, invalidating the scam business model and crippling the scammer ecosystem.
The innovation is somewhat similar to a contact center voice biometrics system, which – when it detects a fraudster – passes them through to a queue.
There, the fraudster sits on hold – not knowing that another agent will not pick up - until they eventually lose patience and hang up.
Another similar anti-scam use case contact centers employ begins with a conversational intelligence system. With this, service leaders dig into scam calls, uncover patterns, and warn agents in real-time.
The trouble is that these systems come at a high price point, which many SMBs can't afford.
However, suppose telecom companies deploy a bot like Apate across their networks. In that case, there is an opportunity to get ahead of scammers without contact centers having to do their own research.
The telecoms provider may also keep businesses up to date on the latest scams to add a second layer of security.
Meanwhile, the innovation may support everyday consumers too. As Kaafar concluded: “People will not have to suffer the daily grievance of deciphering whether a call is a scam or not.”
Of course, it’s also satisfying to know that the scammer is wasting their time talking to a robot.
