

First, I’d say it depends on the rumour. But in general for a sufficiently serious rumour:
Being “wrong about me” wouldn’t be the thing I’m pissed about. Anyone can assume the worst of anyone else, god knows I’ve done more than my fair share of that. But to spread a rumour goes above and beyond in level of malice. They showed that they, 1, didn’t care whether what they were saying was the truth or not, 2, didn’t care how it would affect me if they were wrong, and 3, are willing to ruin someone else’s social standing to improve their own since that’s usually why people spread rumors. Without further context to the contrary, these are systemic traits of a horrible person and strongly suggest they’ll do it again no matter how sorry they say they are.
If you’re okay with involving LLMs in this, you can use it to string them along and make them think you’re falling for the scam (I assume it’s a scam because I’ve never heard of a legitimate business using tactics like this). That way they waste their time chasing a lead that will never actually net them any money, and prevents them from scamming someone else in that time.
Don’t even need an automated system for this, just paste their email into an AI and paste the phony response back.
I think of all the ways AI is being used, messing with scammers is one of the ways that’s actually beneficial for society. You can self host a Deepseek instance on your own computer and it doesn’t actually use that much energy.