CommBank unleashes ‘bot army’ with Aussie accents to trap scammers

Listening to Linda Williams complain about her day while talking to a call centre operator as she fumbles around to find her credit card, it sounds like she’s falling hook, line and sinker for an obvious scam.

The person on the other end of the line, who purports to be from a retailer’s fraud department and initially addresses Williams as “Madam”, tells her that suspicious activity has been detected on her account – a Macbook Pro was purchased for $780, to be delivered to a Thailand address.

Cyber scammers are using AI to help them make more frequent and more sophisticated attacks.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

In an alarmed tone, Williams tells the operator that she lives in Sydney and never ordered the computer. The caller then informs Williams she can cancel the order, but that she’ll need her credit card details to do so.

“All right gimme a sec, ah, sorry mate, let me try to, I think it’s in my wallet, but it’s been a crazy day and I’m not even sure I can do things right today,” Williams says. Moments later, she reads out her card details.

However, the scammer will never get any money out of her.

Williams can’t be defrauded, because she doesn’t exist.

She’s an artificial intelligence-powered bot, part of a new army of fake personas with convincing voices and backstories as vulnerable Australians that will go into battle with criminals seeking to swindle people out of their money.

Williams’ call was just one of what will be roughly 10,000 daily phone calls, and about 2500 text exchanges that the “bot army” – which is an initiative from Commonwealth Bank and Macquarie University-born artificial intelligence firm Apate.ai – will conduct.

The conversational bots have been engineered to waste scammers’ time, which diverts them from contacting real people. At the same time, the bots will gather intelligence to help banks stay ahead of the latest scamming trends.

“The whole vibe is that we are essentially turning the tables on the scammers and using AI to actually fight back against them,” said James Roberts, CommBank’s general manager of group fraud. “Every minute that a scammer is talking to one of the bots they’re not scamming another Australian,” he said.

Professor Dali Kaafar, the chief executive and founder of Apate.ai, explained that the company works with telco providers to operate a network of dedicated phone numbers, and creates a “honey pot” – placing lists of fake names and real phone numbers in strategic places online “designed specifically to be discovered and targeted by scammers”.

While the bots are likely to find their way onto lists generated by auto-dialler programs used by scam call centres to con Australians, their voices and personas have been designed to mimic speech intonations, tones and accents to avoid being detected as computer-generated.

“The bots are uniquely crafted with diverse identities – varying in gender, age, tone, and cultural nuance – and fine-tuned with Australian slang and humour to improve realism,” Kaafar said.

Beyond disrupting the efficiency of scamming operations and wasting their time, the broader goal of the bot program is to gather intelligence on how fraudsters are operating and when new cons emerge, to be able to intervene and block suspicious payments.

While Commbank will receive insights in real-time and incorporate them into its internal fraud prevention efforts, Roberts said the bank would be sharing the intelligence with the broader banking industry.

“We’re trying to make Australia a harder, and even the hardest, target for scammers,” Roberts said. “We know no single organisation or sector can solve this alone. That’s why it is so important to collaborate across sectors to disrupt scam operations at scale,” he said.

Commbank’s partnership with Apate.ai is the latest in a wave of banks looking to use artificial intelligence to tackle scamming. In May, Westpac announced an AI-powered call assistant that joins calls between customers and call centre operators to identify scam indicators.

Morgan Stanley research released on Tuesday noted that while Commbank had led the banking sector on using AI, other players such as Westpac and NAB were increasingly tapping into the technology for tasks including lowering costs, enhancing products and increasing customer engagement, in addition to security risk management.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.