A new idea for messing with spammers

Spam, both with email and over phone, is becoming a huge problem. There are plans from tech companies to do more to cut down on both, but it's here to stay for a while.

Part of the problem is that so much of it is automated, at least for some of the initial contact. I enjoy wasting spammers' time when I can, but it's hard to know if I'm actually dealing with a real person or not.

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten of The Next Web has come up with a simple and genius way to waste more of their time. He's shared it in full on Twitter, below, but in short he has set up a bunch of email autoresponders to get spammers going in circles. He replies to the initial email, and everything is automated after that.

https://twitter.com/Boris/status/1360208504544444417

If you get email spam, ask them to forward their message over to "bill@noprocurement.com", as that's who can "help" them. From there they'll get a long, twisting series of autoresponders and apologies to keep them busy for days.

I suspect spammers will catch on to this specific example soon, if they haven't already, but the idea could be easily replicated and used again and again. I like it!