A Redditor claims he prompted his AI agent to become a “world class time waster,” and managed to tie up a scammer for 14 hours who was trying to extract a $500 gift card.
The Redditor claims the agent spent four hours stringing the scammer along, pretending to drive to Target, providing dumb status updates like “I’m at the red light now” and “I forgot my purse, going back home. Wait, this isn’t my house.”
It even convinced the man to perform a CAPTCHA test for it, claiming its “eyes were blurry” and it couldn’t see the buttons to wire the money. The scammer actually circled the traffic lights for the AI.
One scammer eventually typed: “Please, just stop talking. I don’t want the money anymore. God bless you but leave me alone.”
Like most of these stories, this one is very entertaining and possibly fictional.
There’s a small cottage industry of people reporting AI agents stringing scammers along. In the same AI_Agent subreddit, the creator of “Granny AI” claims to have wasted 20,000 hours of scammers’ lives pretending to be an old lady, with one call lasting 47 minutes that saw Granny talking about her 28 cats.
Looking closer, the story appeared to be an ad by an entrepreneur in Bangalore selling $29.99-per-month subscriptions to his autonomous call-handling AI agent. The Granny AI closely resembled a doddery old lady agent called Daisy, cooked up by U.K. mobile phone provider Virgin Media O2. O2 admitted the purpose of Daisy was really “to create a campaign to educate the public on the danger of scam calls.”
The technology is very real, however, and in use by the Commonwealth Bank in Australia as part of its partnership with Apate.ai. The startup developed the anti-scam tools as part of government-funded research at Macquarie University. Its bots are engineered to engage scammers in extended conversations in order to disrupt scam operations and gather intelligence so the bank can fortify its own defenses.
Wikipedia data poisoned by Iranian sympathizers
Earlier this year social media users noticed the Wikipedia entry on Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khamenei appeared more favorable than the entry about President Donald Trump. Wikipedia used the term “authoritarian” more than a dozen times in relation to Trump and zero times in relation to the ayatollah.
People on the right thought the reason was that Wikipedia is run by woke leftists, while people on the left thought the Trump article was simply being accurate.
But as NPOV’s Ashley Rindsberg explained, the real reason was that around 40 Wikipedia editors have been engaged in a deliberate pro-Iranian regime and pro-Hamas editing campaign that has all the hallmarks of a sophisticated data-poisoning attack coordinated by the Iranian government.
Between them, the editors have made more than one million edits that downplay the regime’s mass executions and war crimes, they’ve whitewashed Hamas’s genocidal constitution, delegitimized Israel, and positioned fringe academic views on the Israel/Palestine war as mainstream, according to an investigation by NPOV and Pirate Wires.
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One editor named Mhhossein edited Khamenei’s page 217 times and removed information about Iran’s nuclear weapons and protests. He also rewrote entries on assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, 1981 Iranian PM’s office bombing, and Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons.
Three days after the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, Iskandar3233, who is believed to be the ringleader of the Gang of 40, deleted thousands of words of criticism about Hamas and replaced them with a single paragraph downplaying its human rights abuses.
Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee has now permanently banned Iskandar3233 from the site and restricted dozens of other accounts.
Unfortunately, misinformation on Wikipedia feeds directly into answers by LLMs like ChatGPT, which links to Wikipedia more than any other site.
“When AI systems like ChatGPT are queried about Iranian leaders or events, they often draw from these compromised articles. The propaganda doesn’t stay contained—it flows downstream into the broader information ecosystem that millions rely on daily,” wrote NPOV
Fortunately, Wikipedia has now fixed the dearly departed ayatollah’s entry and there is now a single use of the term “authoritarian.”
cointelegraph-magazine.com