Phone scammers should now be worried as "Daisy," an AI-generated granny, is here to the rescue. Scammers have evolved, and some now even use artificial intelligence to con their victims by impersonating others. Since scammers use AI to lure victims into traps, the UK network provider has come up with an AI-based defense mechanism.
Developed by Virgin Media O2, "Daisy" is an AI-generated tool that has the voice of a grandmother. Its purpose is to engage fraudsters in conversation, wasting their time as much as possible. O2 notes,
O2 has today unveiled the newest member of its fraud prevention team, ‘Daisy’. 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 chat to keep them away from real people, while highlighting the need for consumers to stay vigilant as the UK faces a fraud epidemic.
Daisy can keep talking to a scammer for up to 40 minutes at a time. It keeps the scammers engaged by talking about her passion for knitting and providing fraudsters with fake details such as fabricated bank details, addresses, etc.
The AI-generated tool is developed using a custom-trained large language model with the help of one of YouTube"s best scam baiters, Jim Browning. Daisy is trained to respond to any questions from the scammers without needing any input from her creators. It listens to the caller, transcribes the text, sends it to LLM, and sends the generated response using text-to-speech.
Murray Mackenzie, Director of Fraud at Virgin Media O2, said, "We’re committed to playing our part in stopping the scammers, investing in everything from firewall technology to block out scam texts to AI-powered spam call detection to keep our customers safe." He further recommended that anyone in the UK worried about fraud can forward any call or messages they suspect from being a scammer to 7726 for free so that it can be investigated.