Baiting Scammers
My current role doesn’t see me writing much code. Lots of configuring services, diagnosing errors, but nothing that looks like an IDE. It’s been nearly 18 months since I wrote any production code, and what an 18 months to miss.
Vibe coding, Claude, Chat GPT, Copilot, Cursor, all just names on Social Media posts, Meetup session events and obviously many an article on LinkedIn.
All that changes very soon. I’m launching into a fairly sizeable project in the coming weeks, one I would have deemed impossible for one person 10 years ago.
Anyway, I digress. I needed a small project that fulfilled a few goals:
- Just how do you use these coding tools to write code, like what are the actual practicalities of getting Claude or Loveable or any of these other tools to write code for me based on a prompt.
- How much is it going to cost?
- Has to be practical. I’m really bad at writing code for the sake of writing code.
- Be a decent topic to restart this Blog and hopefully get a few posts from it. More on that soon.
I’ll write about the first 2 in a future blog, for now I am just excited to show you what I made!
I’m a member of quite a few meetups, a few of them about tech, .Net in particular, Melb.NET Meetup. Melbourne .NET User Group and DDD Melbourne By Night to name a few.
They are all plagued by the same problem. Scammers posting fake job adverts with links to an online form to scrape data. The admins of these groups are excellent at deleting the posts, but not before the notification email has gone out to every member in the group. They are persistent. At least 1 or 2 a week.
I wanted to see what I could do to help discourage the scammers from posting. I also miss working with Selenium and the madness that is a modern html document.
So Claude and I made the Scam Baiting Form Completer. Still in it’s infancy and now working on reliability and maintainability issues. PR’s, Forks and issues welcome!