Cohort: 3

Members: (Netsafe) Brent Carey, Sean Lyons, (Standard Security) Michael Aiello, Paul Williams

Problem: Email scams are not only impacting our economy, with losses reported up to NZ$ 3 billion, but also our near and dear, with heavy burden falling on digitally inexperienced users and financially vulnerable households. As scam prevention remains a proactive system, scammers continue to operate at almost no cost or friction.

Approach: changing scam reporting from a passive intake process to an active adversary-disruption workflow, through a platform that creates personalised AI personas to autonomously engage scammers in long conversations, wasting their time and disrupting operations at scale. 

Result: The platform mobilized over 40,000 citizens who forwarded scam emails for AI engagement, consuming more than 7,500 hours of scammer time across 297,490 emails and 9,510 unique scammer accounts.