California man creates AI chatbot to waste the time of telemarketers

(TND) — You can ignore calls from unknown numbers.

You can hang up immediately when you hear a recorded telemarketer message.

Or you can use a chatbot to mess with them.

That’s what one California man is doing with his ChatGPT-powered tool.

Roger Anderson operates a subscription service called Jolly Roger, and several thousand customers pay him about $25 a year to use his product of “mass distraction,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

The goal is to keep a telemarketer or scammer on the line, just to frustrate them and waste their time for trying to waste yours.

But artificial intelligence does the heavy lifting for you.

Anderson told the WSJ that his chatbots use a combination of preset expressions and topic-specific responses that are fed through a voice cloner so the telemarketer thinks he or she is actually talking to a real person.

The WSJ described one such interaction. A chatbot named “Whitey” Whitebeard picked up a call from a recorded female voice with a warning about a Bank of America account.

When Whitebeard (the chatbot) said something back, the telemarketer call was transferred to a real person who tried to talk to the chatbot about credit card consolidation.

Anderson told the WSJ that it sounded like the caller was fishing for financial information that could be used in identity theft.

But the caller, who apparently didn’t work for Bank of America, only got goofy responses that drug out the conversation.

When asked about how much Whitebeard owes on his credit cards, Whitebeard said he has “so many of them” and proceeded to describe them.

“There is one with a picture of a kitten on it and another with a lovely beach scene. Do you like kittens or beaches?” the chatbot replied.

The WSJ reports this particular call lasted over 6 minutes before the telemarketer gave up and hung up.

Some of the Jolly Roger chatbot calls can last up to 15 minutes, the WSJ reports.