Scammers worldwide are making off big. Last year alone, the Federal Trade Commission estimates US consumers lost a record $10 billion due to fraud, a 14% increase from just one year prior. More and more, scammers are targeting older, vulnerable people over the phone. Over than two-thirds of UK residents over the age of 75 surveyed in a recent research paper claimed they had experienced at least one fraud attempt in the past six months. 40% of those respondents faced frequent fraud attempts.
Now, an AI-generated UK grandmother named “Daisy” is trying scammers’ jobs a bit more tedious. UK mobile operator Virgin Media O2 created Daisy in order to speak with bad actors and waste as much of their time as possible. Using ChatGPT-like large language models, Daisy will ramble on about her passion for knitting and tell long-winded, fabricated stories about family members with the goal of keeping scammers on the line. In theory, every minute spent frustratingly chatting with Daisy about its made-up family or daily chores is one less minute a scammer could be targeting a real person.
“The newest member of our fraud-prevention team, Daisy, is turning the tables on scammers–outsmarting and outmaneuvering them at their own cruel game simply by keeping them on the line,” Virgin Media O2 Director of Fraud Murray Mackenzie said in a blog post.
AI grandmother was trained on real scam calls
O2 says it worked with professional scam network disruptors to have phone numbers linked to the AI added to known lists of numbers targeted by scammers. If a scammer tries to call one of those numbers they will immediately start interacting with Daisy. Recorings of conversations with the scammers posted by O2 show Daisy trolling exacerbated scammers by talking about its…
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