Dealerbot

Background

Antwerp, Belgium, is the cocaine capital of Europe. Cocaine finds its way from the harbour to the streets through a sophisticated network of street dealers.

These dealers use text messaging to let clients and potential clients know when there are supplies.

Idea

Introducing DealerBot, a self-learning sms-bot, programmed to keep dealers busy by engaging them in long, very long, conversations. While most bots are programmed to make life easier, Dealerbot is designed to make things more complicated and to keep conversations going for as long as possible by making appointments and then failing to keep them. DealerBot operated through hundreds of different phone numbers, thus filling dealers’ databases with hundreds of corrupted numbers. Now, every time a dealer gets a text message, he or she doesn’t know if it’s a real client or a waste of time.

This forces them to make more phonecalls, which makes them more easily traceable by the police.

Results

In the first two weeks of its existence, DealerBot sent out 13,509 text messages and got 13,598 replies from 886 different dealer numbers. So, on average, it wasted over 4,000 minutes of their time.

That’s at least 66 wasted ‘dealer-hours’. In just two weeks.

After bringing DealerBot out in the open, it was picked up in national press, radio and television, leading to full page interviews with spokespeople from Reset and Mothers Against Drugs. A debate was started about how dealers were allowed to operate so brazenly.

Our Thoughts

Invented in 1984 and added to mobile phones without fanfare as a service in 1994, the humble text is the world’s most used form of communication. So while SMS is not in itself innovative, what is new is how Anonymous use it here to do the exact opposite of what it is supposed to be, which is simple and quick. This idea is simply too counter-intuitive for dealers to realise they are being strung along. It is a brilliant insight into human behaviour.

Normally, of course, the agency would want to brag about it, but in this instance they have to keep schtumm, for obvious reasons. There must be some very annoyed pushers in Belgium and Holland today.