Scamming the Scammers: Using ChatGPT to Reply Mails for Wasting Time and Resources

Abstract: The use of AI to support cybersecurity operations is now a consolidated practice, e.g., to detect malicious code or configure traffic filtering policies. The recent surge of AI, generative techniques and frameworks with efficient natural language processing capabilities dramatically magnifies the number of possible applications aimed at increasing the security of the Internet. Specifically, the ability of ChatGPT to produce textual contents while mimicking realistic human interactions can be used to mitigate the plague of emails containing scams. Therefore, this paper investigates the use of AI to engage scammers in automatized and pointless communications, with the goal of wasting both their time and resources. Preliminary results showcase that ChatGPT is able to decoy scammers, thus confirming that AI is an effective tool to counteract threats delivered via mail. In addition, we highlight the multitude of implications and open research questions to be addressed in the perspective of the ubiquitous adoption of AI.