Tired of those pesky scam calls, AI chatbots might be able to help.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

It's likely you've gotten a phone call in the last few years that started out like this.

This is a courtesy call to renew your warranty before we close the file.

Scam calls about fake warranty renewals, non-existent credit card bills, and more are still a global problem. Now some companies and telecommunications

providers are turning to AI chatbots to intercept the calls before they ever reach a real person.

Dali Kaffar is founder and CEO of Apate AI, an Australia-based company creating these chatbots.

We spoke to him recently about how his company is designing these bots to scam the scammers.

We basically create what we call a perfect victim, right? And so these are AI personas.

They are specifically designed and trained to engage the scammers to keep them talking

and yeah, pretty much to waste their time, of course. But the other very important piece is that

while you're keeping them distracted from your actual victims, right, or your actual customers,

rather, you can have that as a

huge opportunity to extract critical information from the mouth of the scammers themselves,

as it's not only providing, you know, this accurate view of what the scam landscape looks like

in real time.

But it's putting all these organizations that are being impersonated, for example,

and their customers ahead of the scammer's tactics.

It's before even they reach to those potential victims that you could provide them

with alerts about everything that the scammers is about to do.

So what makes for an effective scam-baiting AI chat bot? What qualities that do you train?

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