Rogue bots run amok on WeChat – flirting, scamming, and spamming

Photo credit: martialred / 123RF.

She calls herself Cara. She looks like a model – large eyes, perfect skin – and teaches yoga for a living. She says her hometown is Changchun, a northeastern city not far from North Korea, and lives in Shanghai with her parents.

Cara is also a chatbot.

“She’ll be a little bit flirty,” Matthew Brennan, co-founder of WeChat consulting and research firm China Channel, tells Tech in Asia. “It doesn’t feel like a bot at all.”

Matthew discovered Cara through a friend who found her on Momo, a Chinese dating and live streaming app. Cara’s maker sent the bot’s WeChat name to users she matched with on Momo, before letting it loose on the Chinese messaging app.

“The whole idea is to get the hongbao,” Matthew explains, using the Chinese word for red envelope, the way to gift cash on WeChat. “As soon as the hongbao’s out, it’s collected immediately.”

Over the course of a few days, Cara chats up would-be suitors in a mixture of voice and text messages, eventually asking for a small favor: a transfer of US$27. It isn’t a lot – just enough to order something from Hong Kong, the bot says.

“I’ll treat you to a midnight snack in a few days,” she promises in an audio message, her voice soft and pouting. “And don’t get the wrong idea – I’m only asking you because we’re friends.”

Black-market bots for sale

Chatbots rocketed into the limelight last year, bolstered by the enthusiasm of Facebook and Microsoft, though the technology wasn’t mature yet.

In China, however, the response was more muted. While Facebook was busy pushing its new Messenger app – boasting when it hit 11,000 bots – Tencent, the maker of WeChat, quietly let millions of accounts develop AI-powered bots of their own, keeping a wary eye out for abuse. Accounts like Cara, for example, are shut down, as Tencent wants to confine bots to customer service-related functions within brand accounts.

But unsanctioned bots run amok on the social network, often tactlessly spamming groups or artificially inflating a brand’s likes and follows. The Chinese tech firm clamped down last year on thousands of accounts, denouncing the use of external software to alter WeChat. Tencent did not reply to queries about its policies on bots.

Unlike WeChat’s “official” accounts, designed for commerce and media, these rogue bots hijack personal accounts. They can be purchased on Taobao, the country’s most popular online marketplace, for a couple of dollars or less. Some accounts are even “farmed” before they’re sold, which means they already have friends and have logged a certain amount of human-like activity, such as posting on Moments, WeChat’s newsfeed-like feature.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way