Description:

Netsafe is a non-profit cyber-safety organisation that gives Kiwis the education and tools to keep them safe online; from online bullying to healthy social media usage.

Re:Scam was initially created in 2017 by Netsafe to fight back against internet scammers. The AI bot and one of its five predetermined personalities successfully kept scammers trapped in conversations by impersonating realistic human personas, keeping scammers out of Kiwi inboxes. When someone received a phishing email, they could forward it to me@rescam.org the program then picked up the conversation and replied to the scammer based on the key words in the email. Replies were designed to lead scammers on for as long as possible with exchanges that wasted limitless hours of their time. Re:Scam collectively wasted over 5 years' worth of time over the duration of the campaign (2017-2018).

With an ever-growing need for better scam protection in New Zealand and globally, and increasingly sophisticated AI technologies available, we were tasked to find a way to launch Netsafe’s new and improved Re:Scam 2.0, returning to fight back against scammers once again. Re:Scam 2.0 harnesses the power of the latest AI technology, utilising an infinite number of personalities and conversation variations to keep scammers engaged for longer than ever before.

To show that anyone could be a victim of an email scam, Re:Scam was created to mimic various types of personalities. This is visualised in our range of avatars which show people young and old across different ethnicities. With deliberate spelling mistakes and malapropisms, each “character” has their own backstory and unique way of talking. Our bots are programmed to be as frustrating and time-consuming as possible, while remaining human enough to avoid detection. Sometimes our bots would accuse the scammers themselves of being bots.

The typography used is a considered pairing of geometric technical sophistication and humanistic soft elegance. This runs the core of the idea of a real person interacting with A.I. throughout the foundation of the system.

Throughout our extensive design system, we strictly use blue as our single campaign colour to evoke a sense of trust and security. This blue light element is strategically incorporated into design elements, highlighting messaging where needed.

To tie everything together and keep consistency across communications, we created a living campaign brand book to house all design assets and guidelines, that was updated as the project evolved.

Through the relaunch of Re:Scam 2.0 we want to generate conversation and behaviour change amongst the New Zealand public. This tool gives everyday people the opportunity to fight back against scammers without spending copious amounts of time themselves. The simple action of forwarding their email allows is all that is required. Within the first 5 days of launch (17-21 June 2023), the Re:Scam 2.0 bot successfully responded to over 4,500 emails, wasting 359 hours of scammers' time.