An artificially intelligent chat-bot called Re:scam has won the Anti-Fraud Award at the end of the International Fraud Film Festival 2018, which wrapped up on Saturday.

Created by Netsafe, Re:scam was designed to respond to scam e-mails.

Since its application the bot has sent more than one million e-mails in reply to scammers and has held 70,000 never-ending conversations with scammers, which the creators says has wasted five years’ of their time.

“Re:scam captured the attention of the world and is a worthy winner of the Southern Hemisphere’s only anti-fraud award” Ian Tuke, Chair of the festival, said.

Other nominees for the award included Transparency International and the Banking Ombudsman.

The themes for this year’s film festival, held at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, were corruption, technology and dishonesty.

The festival also featured the documentary film Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.

The documentary followed the Sung family and the indictment of their New York, family bank, Abacus Savings Bank, which served the New York Chinese community.

Though small in comparison to some of the larger banks that committed similar misconducts during the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Abacus was the only bank to be criminally indicted in the aftermath; even though the bank had itself alerted authorities to fraud being committed by an employee.