Some really smart people at the University of Illinois in Chicago have written an application that can keep conversations going with scammers of all kinds in order to make them use up all their free time in endless conversations without end.
The robot can even simulate different personalities to make the mail exchange more convincing.
Here’s a really great example between the spamalot robot personality Arthur and a scammer:
http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~lszyba1
Two presentations from MIT SpamConference 2007 last Friday:
(The sound is really bad but gets better after a minute or so).
This is a really great idea! Well worth my personal Nobel Prize.