14 DAY TRIAL // Brian Weinreich, partner and developer at Rounded and Density, has created an automated email bot that has been sending canned replies to spammers, keeping them busy with endless and senseless conversations for days and sometimes weeks.
Weinreich created his bot two years ago when he got tired of all the spam he was receiving. "Email spam is real-life spam," Weinreich said. "My inbox is a sacred place, and spammers [removed] all over it."
"I figured if I could eat up a spammers time, then they would have less time to perfect their new spamming technique," Weinreich wrote in a Medium post detailing his creation.
Enter MLooper, a spammer's worst nightmare
The bot, called MLooper, or sp@mlooper, is a Ruby-based service running on a Web server. The code, which is also freely available on GitHub, will take any message that's forwarded to it, and interpose itself in the conversation, assuming the victim's identity.
It will then reply to the spam email, asking the spammer for more details. Weinreich says he carefully tuned the bot's answers across years to be as generic as they can be.
Nevertheless, spammers didn't notice anything, and some of them engaged in conversations that spanned for as much as 41 days.
The spammers didn't even notice anything strange when Weinreich, bored, one day, decided to use random "hipster" phrases as the spam bot's signature.
Code available on GitHub
Spammers continued to answer, and the bot continued to reply. So much so that Weinreich is now confident that his bot can do some good and has announced its availability on Github.
According to Weinreich, the bot has even managed to get a $50 discount for some sort of software package. The developer has also published some of the most hilarious conversations on MLooper's website.