It’s not the healthiest of pastimes, but I sometimes try to come up with new and entertaining ways to respond to scammers.
Sometimes I’m straightforward
sometimes I’m friendly
and of course most of the time I just ignore them and try not to let the frustration get to me. I hate the idea that someone makes money by making thousands of people just a tiny bit less happy every day. I’m generally pretty upset by the way our commercial endevours so often treat human discomfort or suffering as an “externality”, but that’s a topic for another day.
I do realize that the people actually sending the messages — and reading my responses, if anyone does — are often in tough positions or being exploited themselves. So I try not to be too unkind.
I want to preface this next bit by saying that I’m really, truly, not a fan of “AI” as a cultural phenomenon (also a topic for another day). But I did ask an LLM to come up with the wording of my latest scammer response text, and boy, did it deliver.
Sadly, as with virtually all my scammer conversations, this approach hasn’t gotten any responses. I’ll keep trying.