Daisy, the talkative grandmother, managed to trap the crooks

Daisy is a conversational AI bot created by UK mobile operator O2 to help fight fraud by fooling phone scammers; He does this by tricking scammers into thinking they’re talking to a real person.

At first glance, Daisy, the talkative grandmother who has become famous these days, looks like the stereotypical grandmother of stories; She loves to knit and talk about her family, has a cat named Fluffy, is inept with technology, and spends a lot of time snaring scammers.

But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that he’s got some pretty cool tech, mixed with some clever tricks. The creation and development of Daisy shows how artificial intelligence can be used both positively and negatively in online scams.

According to surveys, more than a trillion dollars were lost worldwide last year due to online scams. Daisy’s mission, according to the company that developed it, is to talk to scammers and waste as much of their time as possible with impassioned human-like chatter to keep them away from real people.

In a statement released earlier this month, the company said Daisy’s tactics resulted in “a large number of scammers contacting her for 40 minutes.”

Last year, Virgin Media O2, the wider telecoms group, blocked more than £250 million in suspected fraudulent transactions, which it said equated to stopping one transaction every two minutes.

Using a large custom language model, Daisy can have independent conversations with scammers; Created in collaboration with London advertising agency VCCP, Daisy’s voice was modeled after the grandmother of one of the company’s employees.

While anyone can become a victim of fraud, fraud gangs often target the elderly. During the call, Daisy tells the scammers her convoluted family story, she talks about her passion for knitting and provides the scammers with false personal information, including fabricated bank details.

Not wanting to waste time is one of the reasons some people don’t fall for scammers, the company says, while Daisy has “all the time in the world.”

In fact, he has a lot of time; In a video released by Daisy’s production company of her actual conversation with one of the scammers, one of the angry scammers can be heard shouting, “It’s been almost an hour!”

Another scammer tells him: “I think your job is to harass people.”

“I’m just trying to have a little chat,” Daisy replies.