00:00yeah that's correct so there's essentially two types of bot that we're running one is a voice
00:07bot which literally adopts australian personalities humor and nuances to pretend to be a real human
00:16being and we also have messaging bots that have interactions which are in the written form also
00:23mimicking the australian population to protect them and really super simply for any minute
00:29that our bots are engaged with the scammers those are minutes that are not that the scammers are not
00:37spent engaging with australians so essentially you're hoping to waste scammers time with bots
00:45apart from wasting their time how else do you think that this could disrupt scamming do you
00:51actually expect potentially these bots to figure out where the scammers are located and put the cops on
00:57them yeah so um the scale of the bots is quite significant there's 10 000 voice bots and 2 500
01:05messaging bots um that's the initial scale that we're rolling out to um we're encouraging other
01:12banks and telcos to join us uh on this journey so that we can build almost a national immunity to
01:18scammers if you like a defensive layer that makes it less profitable for scammers to operate uh within
01:24australia have you heard any of these calls yet between bots and scammers what sorts of things have
01:32the scammers been saying as they figured out that you've got bots on them um so generally speaking not
01:38yet there will come a point that they do um the calls are often very long um our longest call at the
01:44minute is 55 minutes where the scammers are completely unaware of it we also use the scam conversations
01:52both in messaging and voice to collect intelligence as well which we pull into the
01:57fraud systems at combang and we use that to protect other australians so simplistically one phone call
02:03might result in one piece of intelligence that then saves 10 other australians so a big multiplier
02:09effects to the efficiency and productivity of the bots and so you're using ai to power these bots there has
02:18been concerns from some quarters that robots are going to steal all of our jobs is anyone at combang
02:23actually losing their job as you send out the bots no not at all this is a complete innovation
02:31where ai has actually unlocked an ability to go further in deeper in making criminal syndicates
02:38profitability less so there's no job losses associated with that at combang and when it comes to scams as i
02:45mentioned 150 million lost so far this year and we're only in agreement at this point major banks
02:52have been criticized by consumer groups for putting the onus onto customers to not be scammed and then
02:58avoiding compensating customers when they are what do you make of this ongoing criticism against the banks
03:03so maybe what's helpful is um on the 20th of february the government instituted the new scams
03:12prevention framework act that gained royal assent um that places strong accountability in terms of
03:20fines if there is non-compliance in either the banks telecommunication industries or the digital
03:26platform social media and the like if we don't comply with the limits of those acts so a real
03:33strengthening and shared accountability and it's that shared accountability of reducing the bad content
03:38out there on sms's voice calls social media and the banks uplifting at the back end on the payment rails
03:45that's likely to be the successful story for australia
03:48you
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