SINGAPORE: A man from Malaysia was praised online for creating a chatbot designed to waste scammers’ time.
In what could be considered a Valentine’s Day gift, Dylan Tan shared his creation on Feb 14 on the Entrepreneurs and Startups in Malaysia group Facebook page. The chatbot, humorously named SOHAI (Scammers On Hold AI), has a clear purpose—keeping scammers engaged and preventing them from targeting real victims.
“Here’s SOHAI’s phone number: https://wa.me/6588591998,” wrote Mr Tan, who went on to explain how it works. However, scammers quickly caught on and reported the number, prompting Mr Tan to replace it. He explains how to get the new number in his IG post below.
The idea is simple: when a scammer reaches out to you, or if you see an ad for a scam, give them SOHAI’s phone number.
“SOHAI will infinitely waste their time by giving excuses, digressing, and acting clueless. If the scammer doesn’t reply, SOHAI will follow up with the scammer to annoy them back,” he wrote each chat will be saved into a leaderboard on Google Sheets with time wasted, summary of the chat, and tactics that SOHAI used to waste their time.
He added “Every minute of scammer time wasted is one less minute of them scamming someone else. Enjoy!”
Mr Tan also shared screenshots of the chatbot in action both in English and Chinese. In one of them, the chatbot pretended to be a 62-year-old man named Ah Kow, which appears to be intentional, since scammers are known to target older people who are not as tech or investment-savvy, or who are unfamiliar with scammers’ modus operandi.
One of the sample screenshots was of SOHAI’s leaderboard with summaries of conversations with scammers who introduced themselves as “Riza” and “Ashley.”
More information about the chatbot may be found in a video Mr Tan put up on Instagram.
“I hate scammers, so I built an AI for us to fight back,” he says in the video, explaining that his creation pretends to be a “gullible senior citizen” who “infinitely” wastes scammers’ time by pretending not to understand the scammer, gives “outrageous excuses, and digresses away from the scam.”
SOHAI, however, doesn’t stop there. When scammers stop replying, the chatbot follows up with more replies and continues to annoy them.
In a later edit to the post, Mr Tan wrote that scammers had caught on to what the chatbot was doing and so he has changed its number. Anyone who wants to learn the new number for SOHAI should send him a direct message on the Instagram account @replyr.ai.
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