Most of the time we can easily spot a scam email, text or social media link but there are times when you need a bit of expert advice before making the final call to click on that link.
Enter .. Scamio.
As I explained to Jaynie Seal on Sky News Weekend Edition in the video above, Scamio is a free scam detection service from Bitdefender, driven by artificial intelligence. You do need to create an account but other than that, it’s a free, safe service to use.
It’s accessed via web browser or through Facebook Messenger. It incorporates advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand and interpret user conversations (even language nuances and subtleties typically used in scams) accurately.
Just like most chatbots, Scamio will interact with you in a conversational style. It offers a strong second opinion on potential fraud attempts by analysing emails, text messages, images, individual links, and even QR codes. QR codes is a big one!
Users just copy and paste a link, or image into the chatbot interface and Scamio provides a verdict along with recommendations on further action (‘delete’ and/or ‘block contact’ for example) and preventative measures to protect against that type of scam against future attempts.
I found the links I tested received a response in a few seconds while the images took longer, sometimes over a minute.
Even hardened online warriors will benefit from a service like Scamio.
If you want to give it a try you can have a go here.