FYP-ScamSword / scam-chat

Prototype web service to facilitate anonymous online chats with scammers

Scam Chat

Table of contents

• Scam Chat
  • Table of contents
  • About
  • Getting Started
    • Prerequisites
    • Usage
  • Roadmap
  • Contributing
  • License

About

Scam chat is a service that facilitates the sending and receiving messages for canary accounts accounts in order to enable pseudonymous online chats . It uses the GramJS client library to connect to Telegram

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• NodeJS (version 16 recommended)
• MongoDB instance

Usage

Account API setup

• Navigate to tests/telegram_api_demo and follow the corresponding README

Project setup

1. Run npm install for project dependencies

2. Create a .env file within the root directory to specify a MongoDB connection string and application port number

   • MONGODB_CONNECTION is a string can be local (mongodb://localhost:27017) or remote
   • PORT can any available local port number of choice. Generally, port numbers 808X are available.
   • RELEASE_TIMEOUT is the time in seconds that a chat session remains assigned to a user before it is released back into the pool of available sessions.
   • ARCHIVE_TIMEOUT is the time in seconds that a chat session remains available before it is archived

   An example of a possible .env configuration:

MONGODB_CONNECTION="mongodb://localhost:27017"
PORT=8081
RELEASE_DURATION=86400 # 1 day
ARCHIVE_DURATION=259200 # 3 days

3. Start the application locally with npm run start. Alternatively, you can also build and run the projectwith Docker using the provided Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml

Roadmap

TBA

Contributing

NA

License

See LICENSE.md