Two years ago, Brian Weinreich, the
co-founder and head of product at Density, an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor
startup, got so fed up of receiving spam emails from his business email account
that he decided to teach a lesson to all future spammers who tried to contact
him
Weinreich considers spam to be as
intrusive and unpleasant as people you don't know stalking you in order to sell
you something, who won't stop pestering you even when you tell them you're not
interested, so he decided to build a solution that would waste spammers' time
in revenge.
"Back in early 2015, I decided
I had enough. It became clear to me: it's my job to stop spam. That 'Spam'
button on Gmail just didn't get me going anymore. There's no reward. I was
seeking revenge.. and some comedic relief," Weinreich wrote in a blog post
on Medium.
"I figured if I could eat up a
spammers time, then they would have less time to perfect their new spamming
technique."
Sp@m
Looper
Spam Bot is available on GitHub for
anyone to download, use or improve upon Brian Weinreich
So he invented the Sp@m Looper, a
bot whose primary function is to respond to spam emails with a series of
open-ended questions that seem like they could be a real person's response to
an email enquiry.
Unfortunately, the very first email
you receive from any unique spammer will still go into your inbox, but once
forwarded to sp@mlooper.com, the bot then takes action and continues to
automatically respond to all emails from same spammer's email address until the
spammer decides to stop sending you emails.
Weinreich developed the bot and put
it to work on an email address he specifically created for a non-existent man
named "John Turing", who is the founder and chief executive of a
fictitious company called MLooper. He soon found that spammers were actually
tricked into exchanging at least five emails with the bot before they realised
that they weren't talking to a real person.
Bot
managed to negotiate discounts
This continued even when he changed
the script to insert random "hipster words" at the end of the emails,
which made it even clearer that the emails weren't coming from a human being,
and – at one point – the bot even managed to negotiate a good discount on some
software a spammer was hawking.
"I think one of the most
interesting findings I had was the fact that after the first month, I didn't
have to feed the Looper anymore," wrote Weinreich. "People were just
spamming it on their own. It was miraculous. It reminded me a lot of the Hydra
– the more people the Sp@m Looper responded to, the more spammers it
attracted."
Weinreich has compiled some of the
funny email exchanges for people to read on MLooper.com, and he has also made
the code available on GitHub so that anyone can download it to run their own version or to
improve on the bot to make it even more annoying, sorry, efficient.