Artificial intelligence a smart weapon to scam the scammersAustralian scammers have unknowingly wasted seven months chatting to AI bots after Vodafone’s cunning plan to turn the tables on fraudsters.CHRISTOPHER NIESCHEVodafone has teamd up with Apate, an Australian fraud prevention company that uses AI bots to impersonate customers and engage scammers who attack via phone and email.Gift this article3 min read15 hours agoA scammer makes a call to an Australian consumer, saying they’re ringing from the Amazon fraud department and that the customer’s account has been charged $999.98 for a MacBook Pro. The scammer takes the confused and concerned consumer through the details of the purchase and says that to cancel the purchase they’ll need credit card details. What the scammer doesn’t know is that the person they speak to for seven and a half minutes isn’t really an Australian consumer. In fact, they’re not even a person. Instead, they are chatting to an artificial intelligence bot, the latest weapon telco Vodafone is rolling out to help protect its customers against fraudsters.Vodafone has teamed up with Apate, an Australian fraud prevention company that uses AI to impersonate customers and engage scammers over the phone and emails. The telco routinely blocks calls from scammers before they get to customers, but since April this year some calls are begin diverted to Apate’s AI bots instead.“The purpose was to engage the scammers and waste their time,” explains Amelia Limbrick, Vodafone’s senior customer security, fraud & scam governance manager. So far, more than 435,000 calls have been transferred to the bots, wasting the equivalent of seven months of scammers’ time.Another benefit from the collaboration has also emerged.“What we’ve found from our relationship with Apate is the amount of information we’ve been able to actually extract – and the actual intelligence out of that has been phenomenal,” Limbrick says.If a customer is scammed by text, it’s easy for Vodafone’s fraud department to understand what happened, because customers will often forward the texts. But gathering intelligence from phone scams is a lot more difficult. TPG customer security and investigations manager Amelia Limbrick.Customers might only remember part of the conversation and can be reluctant to share all the details because they can feel embarrassed about being scammed.“The Apate bots are picking up on what these scammers are actually saying, so we can get better insights on where the scammers are, what they’re trying to do, what companies they’re trying to impersonate as well,” Limbrick says.Limbrick has worked in fraud prevention at Vodafone for nine years and in that time has seen the fraud problem grow worse.“It has changed so much in the time that I’ve been working in this space,” she says. “And it’s so nice to see that we’ve got a lot of investment in this area, and we’re taking it really seriously, but also it’s quite dire to see what the current state of scams is at the moment.” In fact, the 435,000 scam calls ­diverted to Apate pales in comparison to the number of fraud calls Vodafone blocks outright – 37 million so far this year. It has also blocked more than 60 million texts from scammers.Customers are being targeted by social-engineering text messages, where the scammer sends a text about a job or investment ­opportunity – and even pretends they sent the text by mistake – to try to build up trust as a prelude to tricking the customer into transferring funds.SIM swaps, when a fraudster uses a customer’s personal information to convince the customer’s mobile provider to transfer their phone number to a SIM card the fraudster controls, remain common. Once the fraudster has control of the phone, they have access to banking codes, allowing them to steal money.Limbrick says Vodafone helps customers stay safe from SIM swaps by asking them to bring ID into a Vodafone store for verification or doing a “liveliness check”, where the customers upload their ID and then have to ­appear on their phone camera to verify they are a real person.One of the latest scams is for fraudsters to ring people selling cars and tell them they want a specific report, directing them to a fake website where they enter their credit card details.Limbrick says Vodafone is trying to step away from the victim-blaming language that is commonly used. By saying that someone was conned by a scammer instead of “they fell victim”, the company hopes they will take the shame out of being scammed and make people more comfortable talking about it.“I was nearly scammed the other week. I got a phone call from someone saying they were from my bank and that I’d been scammed, and I was on the phone with them for about 11 minutes,” Limbrick says.“I believed every single word they said, because they told me that they weren’t going to ask me for personal information and they gave me the last four digits of my credit card. It was correct.”In the end she wasn’t scammed, because she heeded her own advice: “One single thing that I think I can give to people is, if somebody calls you and they ask you for a code on your mobile phone, do not give it to them.”Read related topics:Back AustraliaMore related storiesSponsored ContentBetter deal, services for regional customersRegional Australians have gained access to dramatically improved mobile services after Vodafone’s massive infrastructure expansion ended their limited network choices.Read moreSponsored ContentIf we want to back Australia, first we must back those who connect usRegional Australians have paid higher mobile prices than city dwellers due to limited competition, but Vodafone’s massive network deal promises to change that forever.Read more