Scambot

‘It was more than an annoyingly persistent scambot,’ he said. ‘That was just a cover for a piece of code set up to send chunks of our code to some cleverly munged I.P. address.’

Just lads, they’d got hold of his phone, lads we were at school with. Saying he had an imaginary girlfriend, she was one of those Russian scambots, you know, wants money, they get your mobile number from somewhere and try to get pin numbers or whatever.

Chatbots are typically following a variation of a table of rules, sometimes randomly accessed (such as in the case of some Tinder scambots), sometimes tied directly to a discrete set of answers like in an online help system.