Business Idea: Destroying the Email Scammer Industry
Hi everyone,

I'm starting a social enterprise to help the world by destroying the scam email industry.

1. Do you think this could work?
2. Do you want to work on this fun little project with me?

Here is my idea:

A browser extension.

The extension gets activated when the user flags an email as a scam email (the typical Nigerian prince or large inheritance scam emails). Then, the extension will use the ChatGPT API to conduct an email conversation (in the background) with the scammer, pretending to be interested in what they have to say.

The goal of the extension, is to reply to the scammers' emails with interest, and drawing out the conversation as long as possible, all while in the background so that the email user doesn't have to do anything but flag the email as a scam email.

By dragging out the conversations, it requires a time investment on the scammers' behalf to read and reply to all of these fake emails -- therefore reducing their scam success rate. If enough people download this extension, it won't be profitable for the scammers anymore because their time investment will have gone so far up that the return isn't worth it.

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Here's an outline of how the extension could work:

1. Trigger: The extension gets activated when the user flags an email as a scam email. This can be done through a flagging system.

2. Background Conversation: Once triggered, the add-on uses ChatGPT to conduct an email conversation with the scammer in the background, without the user having to actively engage in the conversation or even open Gmail (similar to how you don’t have to open Checker Plus Chrome Extension. ChatGPT generates responses to the scammer's emails, pretending to be interested in what they have to say.

3. Conversation Prolonging Tactics: The goal of the add-on is to draw out the email conversation as long as possible to waste the scammer's time and resources. ChatGPT can use various tactics to prolong the conversation, such as asking for more details, pretending to be naive or confused, providing fake information, and showing interest in the scammer's story.

4. Automated Reading and Replying: ChatGPT can automatically read and analyze the scammer's emails, generate appropriate responses, and send them to the scammer without any user intervention. This allows the Gmail user to go about their regular activities while using their browser while the add-on handles the scammer conversation in the background.

5. Reporting: We generate a database of the amount of time the scammer has wasted replying to our emails that gets collected from all the users of the extension. To calculate time wasted we could just create a function that calculates time wasted from reading+writing emails by counting each word in the email and multiplying it by the average time to read/type each word. Also regarding reporting, it would be nice for each user to be able to see how much time they've been able to waste using their email too.

Future Iteration: Considering where AI tech is, it will become very easy to then expand this to the call center scam industry. We call the scammers and let our AI bot have a conversation. The bot will sound so human that the scammers will never know.

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Perhaps this is all just a nice idea in theory but I'd love to get peoples' thoughts on this. AI is intensely scary considering the possible negatives it could have on the world but I think this idea can be a way to show how AI can progress humanity.

The path to success:

1. Build a community of people who want to work on this project together.
2. Figure out a way to perpetually fund this. It's just the API that has a cost really, and perhaps a website).
3. Develop the add-on.
4. Marketing

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Waste scammer time so much that they are forced to find something else to do.