In battle against scams, Malaysians are now armed with a chatbot to waste fraudsters’ time

Artificial intelligence has entered the fray in the battle against scammers in Malaysia, with the launch of a free chatbot that wastes the time of would-be fraudsters by diverting them into endless inane conversation.

Online scams are big business in Southeast Asia, where up to US$37 billion was lost in 2023 to scam industries operating mostly out of the Mekong region, according to data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Malaysian police estimated that Malaysian victims lost 432 million ringgit (US$98 million) to Facebook scams alone that same year.

In an effort to counter the scam industry, AI entrepreneur Dylan Tan launched Scammers on Hold AI – Sohai for short – a name derived from a Cantonese insult meaning “idiot”.

“Scams are such a universal experience and annoyance, I thought I could build something that everyone could use as kind of a way to fight back,” Tan told This Week in Asia.

The system is similar to “Daisy”, the AI granny rolled out by British mass media firm Virgin Media O2 as a short pilot project earlier this year in using AI to frustrate scam callers.

Tan’s mechanism is straightforward – the target of a scam simply provides the potential scammer with Sohai’s phone number.

Once the scammer sends a message to that number over WhatsApp or other apps, the AI kicks in to give an infinite variation of excuses, delays and questions designed to keep them engaged as long as possible and to annoy them to the point of giving up.