Pitting AI Against Phone Scams – A Proactive Defence

Macquarie University, APATE.AI PTY LTD, the CommonWealth Bank of Australia and the Office of National Security are collaborating to deploy an efficient technology to significantly reduce telephony fraud and phone scam threats. The technology developed at Macquarie University consists of a prototype multi-lingual Conversational AI bot and a solution to receive redirected scam calls (in-cloud or on network premises of the telecommunication operator) aiming to disrupt the phone scammers’ business model when deployed at scale. The aim is to address the increasing public menace of phone scams by redirecting scam calls to conversational AI bots optimized to present convincing scam victims. Should a large proportion of scam calls be directed to these bots, much of a scammer's time would be spent with the bots without profit, undermining the scam business model and crippling the scammer ecosystem. Ultimately, at scale, the approach distracts scammers from reaching actual possible victims and reduces substantially the number of calls identified as scams and blocked by the network operator, while also enabling the extraction of threat intelligence in quasi-real time including scam campaigns, scammer methods and scripts so impersonated organisations can be alerted enabling timely response.