British phone company Virgin Media O2 has a new way to trick scammers at their own game: Have an AI-generated grandmother named Daisy answer the phone.
A conversation with Daisy means hearing her talk at length about her passion for knitting or her grandchildren. With no prompting, Daisy can adapt to conversations and even provide fake personal information if scammers request it, per NPR.
Daisy may sound like a grandmother, but she’s actually an AI large language model that takes in a fraudster’s voice, translates it to text, finds an appropriate response based on a database of training data, and “speaks” that response — all within seconds. She was trained with the help of Jim Browning, a YouTuber with over four million subscribers who fights against online scams.
Related: Nearly Half of Americans Think They Could Be Duped By AI. Here’s What They’re Worried About.
O2 says that Daisy has had calls that last up to 40 minutes, where she goes back and forth with a fraudster. There’s a point to all of this conversation: While Daisy chatters away on long phone calls, she’s taking up time that bad actors could be using to talk to real people.
“While they’re busy talking to me, they can’t be scamming you,” Daisy says in a promotional video. “And let’s face it dear: I’ve got all the time in the world.”
O2 named Daisy “Head of Scammer Relations” when introducing it last month and says that the chatbot serves as a reminder of the lengths bad actors will go to carry out their aims. The AI is built into the phone service.
“But crucially, Daisy is also a reminder that no matter how persuasive someone on the other end of the phone may be, they aren’t always who you think they are,” Murray Mackenzie, Director of Fraud at Virgin Media O2, stated in a press release.
Related: How Generative AI Is Fueling the Rise of Fake News and Online Fraud
After talking to Daisy in the promotional video, one scammer angrily said, “I think your profession is bothering people, right?” In a separate instance, another frustratedly exclaimed, “It’s nearly been an hour!”
Since her debut, Daisy has answered more than 1,000 calls, per CBS.
There’s no American equivalent to Daisy yet, though spam calls are a problem in the United States too. According to True Caller, in the period between December 1, 2023 and November 30, 2024, Americans spent 272 million hours answering spam calls. Each American receives an average of around nine spam calls per month.
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