Lucky, or Loser? Chatroom Bot Lets You Be Both

"Flirty Chat-Room 'Bot' Out to Steal Your Identity"

I'm not sure what this is:

• A great step forward in the development of artificial intelligence
• An indication of how simple, shallow, and conventional 'romantic' online chats are

Maybe both.

The place: A computer's monitor, glowing in the dark somewhere.
The person: Some online chatter, seeking love, or a facsimile thereof.

Finally, the lonely netizen gets lucky! Someone's interested! All that's needed is a telephone number, and a postal address, and a photo, and maybe some more personal information.

The problem: The person on the other end isn't human. It's a 'bot' that mimics a flirty chat room user, collects personal information from credulous rubes, and passes the data along.

The official line by the software's publisher is that it's for guys who are too busy to chat up girls, and their female counterparts. It can be used by lovelorn Web surfers, but the odds are that it will be used for identity theft, too.