Phone Provider Deploys "State-of-the-Art AI Granny" to Waste Scammers' Time

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Grandma Design

UK telecom company Virgin Media O2 has unveiled a fascinating AI creation: an audio chatbot that adopts the persona of a confused grandmother. Its sole purpose is to keep phone scammers on the line and waste their time.

“As ‘Head of Scammer Relations,’ this state-of-the-art AI Granny’s mission is to talk with fraudsters and waste as much of their time as possible with human-like rambling,” Virgin Media wrote of the bot. “Created using a range of cutting-edge AI technology and trained with the help of one of YouTube’s best-known scambaiters, Jim Browning, Daisy is a lifelike AI Granny completely indistinguishable from a real person.”

Daisy represents a rare positive application of AI chatbots, which are more often exploited to commit scams than to combat them. This clever reversal could help protect vulnerable individuals, including real grandmothers, who are frequently targeted by fraudsters.

Phone Prone

To keep scammers occupied, Daisy—to which the company automatically connects likely scam callers—relies on confusing digressions about her family and her love of knitting. When asked for bank details, she supplies random numbers instead. O2 reports that she has managed to keep scammers on the line for up to 40 minutes.

“By tricking the criminals into thinking they were defrauding a real person and playing on scammers’ biases about older people, Daisy has prevented them from targeting real victims,” the Virgin blog states.

“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,” Virgin fraud director Murray Mackenzie added.

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