AI Granny Turns Tables on Scammers

Phone scammers, beware! Daisy is on the line, and she has time to spare.

“Who is Daisy?”, you might ask? She is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot created by Virgin Media O2 to fight back against those who use telephones to con people by keeping them talking for as long as possible (or as long as the scammer’s nerves hold up) while sparing potential victims.

The British telecoms company designed Daisy to sound like a sweet, mature English woman, and she uses advanced AI models to transcribe scam calls, generate responses and mimic human speech, all in real time.

Daisy was trained using recordings from professional scambaiters and deliberately crafted to represent a demographic often targeted by fraudsters: the elderly. She engages callers with long, meandering conversations about her cat, Fluffy, or about her passion for knitting. By providing false personal information and fabricated stories, Daisy frustrates con artists, sometimes keeping them on the line for over 40 minutes.

O2 has added Daisy’s number to scammer-targeting lists, ensuring they encounter her instead of real individuals. In recorded calls, scammers have expressed growing annoyance, with one even exclaiming, “It’s nearly been an hour!”, to which Daisy calmly responds, “Gosh, how time flies.”

This initiative highlights the growing use of AI in combating fraud, especially as criminals leverage similar technologies like voice-cloning for sophisticated schemes. O2 hopes Daisy will help curb fraudulent activity while educating the public about common scam tactics.

As Daisy herself says, “I’ve got all the time in the world, dear.”

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