Anti-scam groups are fighting fire with fire, using AI to waste criminals time instead of letting criminals waste yours.
Anti-cybercrime initiatives are increasingly deploying AI bots that pose as real potential victims when cybercriminals make contact. The bots are lifelike enough that scammers reportedly believe they are talking to an actual mark. Instead of hanging up or blocking the contact, the goal is to keep the criminal engaged as long as possible. Every minute spent on a fake conversation is a minute not spent defrauding someone real.
This matters because it flips the usual economics of scams. Fraud operations run on volume: the more people a scammer can work through in a day, the more money they make. Tying up their time with a convincing decoy is a direct hit to that math, not just a feel-good gesture.
The approach is really an old-school honeypot with a new trick: the decoy can now hold a believable, back-and-forth conversation instead of just sitting there waiting to be triggered.