New Israeli App Fisherman Combats Election Spam and AI Phishing Scams

As the election season approaches, Israeli smartphones are once again flooded with political spam, exploiting a loophole in local spam laws. To combat this relentless influx and counter sophisticated phishing attacks, Israeli developer Matan Gidinian has created a free application called Fisherman, designed to organize message inboxes without requiring user registration or personal data.

Hundreds of rotating numbers for a single campaign

During election cycles, voters are routinely targeted by relentless text messages promoting candidates, attacking opponents, or conducting polls. "In commercial advertising, people are accustomed to being able to request removal, but the situation with political messaging is entirely different because political messages are exempt from the spam law," Gidinian explained in an interview with Geektime.

Because political spam faces no legal restrictions, recipients frequently block the sending numbers, triggering a continuous game of cat and mouse. "We actually see attempts to bypass these blocks through the constant rotation of sending numbers," Gidinian noted. "For example, during a specific week, we identified political messages sent from more than 600 completely different phone numbers, all tied to the same campaign. A large portion of these numbers appeared almost exclusively for that specific wave, provided a temporary boost, and then simply vanished."

Contrasting strategies among political parties

Data from the application reveals distinct messaging strategies across different political parties. In factions such as Yashar, Be-Yachad, and The Democrats, the overwhelming majority of messages originate from official senders clearly identified with the party. Conversely, Likud exhibits a vastly different approach.

"There we see extremely high individual activity from Knesset members, with each of them effectively maintaining an independent channel and choosing the specific messages they want to promote. Around the primaries, we saw this scale up to hundreds of different activists," Gidinian elaborated.

Negative campaigning, however, is rarely sent from official channels, instead relying on rotating numbers. This tactic is also frequently observed during internal party disputes, such as messages defaming prominent Knesset members through unofficial pathways.

AI-driven phishing and community-based models

The concept for Fisherman originated four years ago following a combination of political spam and phishing scams that targeted Gidinian's family members and friends. Initially built as an internal tool for his close circle, the application grew organically through word of mouth. Today, advanced artificial intelligence tools allow malicious actors to generate flawless phishing messages in Hebrew within seconds, executing large-scale attacks even without fluency in the language.

This is where Fisherman holds a distinct local advantage over international solutions like Truecaller. The application's machine learning model relies heavily on crowd-sourced reports from Israeli users. Unlike competing services, these reports serve as direct input data for the system rather than blind voting, ensuring that marking a sender as spam does not automatically flag their messages for all other users.

Privacy-first architecture and business model

Addressing privacy concerns, Gidinian emphasized the app's minimalist data collection policy. "Fisherman is completely free, requires no registration, and does not require an account. The app does not ask for or need an email address or phone number. The simple reason is that you do not need to know who a user is in order to protect them," he stated.

To cover cloud and development expenses without compromising user data, Fisherman partners with banks and financial institutions. When clients fall victim to fraud, financial organizations absorb heavy costs associated with account freezing, investigations, and reimbursements. This collaborative model provides users with free protection while helping financial institutions prevent real-time fraud.

Available on Android and iOS, Fisherman plans to expand its protective capabilities beyond SMS messaging in the near future, offering real-time defense against phishing scams while browsing the web.