1 week Ago By Dan Robinson
Watch out, scammers. O2 has created a new weapon in the fight against fraud: an AI granny that will keep you talking until you get bored and give up. O2, the mobile operator arm of Brit telecoms giant Virgin Media ( VMO2 ), says it has built the human-like AI to answer calls from fraudsters in real time, keeping them busy on the phone and wasting their time by pretending to be a potential vulnerable target.
"Daisy" is claimed to be indistinguishable from a real person, fooling scammers into thinking they've found perfect prey thanks to its ability to engage in "human-like" rambling chat, the biz claims. For several weeks in the run-up to International Fraud Awareness Week (November 17–23), the AI has already frustrated scam callers with meandering stories about her family and talked at length about her passion for knitting, according to O2. At this point, many Reg readers are probably feeling they know someone the telco might have used as training data.
But phone scams are an increasingly common threat. Criminals, often working from call centers, cold-call lists of numbers to try to con people out of their money. Common tricks include pretending to be their bank or a courier needing payment to deliver a parcel in order to get them to divulge their bank account details.
Daisy is said to combine various AI models that work together to listen to fraudulent calls and respond immediately, as if engaged in a conversation. Appropriate responses are generated through a custom large language model (LLM) with a character "personality" layer, and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate the spoken answer. O2 claims it to be so lifelike that it has successfully kept fraudsters sidetracked for up to 40 minutes at a time.
Some scammers were even tricked by Daisy offering false personal information, including made-up bank details. The Reg wondered how the telco managed to make this work in practice. Does Daisy step in if an incoming call to a user on its network comes from a number suspected to be that of a scam operator? Sadly, it isn't quite that sophisticated.
The AI has its own dedicated number, which the anti-fraud team managed to infiltrate into contact lists used by scammers to target Brits, an O2 spokesperson told us. "She has her own number. We worked with leading scambaiters as we developed Daisy, including the UK's biggest scambaiter Jim Browning, and they provided us with guidance and tips to help us attract scam calls," the spokesperson said.
Jim Browning is the online alias of a software engineer and YouTuber from Northern Ireland who featured in a BBC Panorama documentary about fighting fraudsters. "Working with Jim and using a range of tactics including something known as number seeding, we were able to get Daisy's phone number added to a list of online 'mugs lists' used by scammers. We then just had to wait for the calls to come in, with Daisy poised and ready to answer whenever the phone rang 24/7," the spokesperson explained.
While it doesn't directly protect people from scam calls, O2 takes the view that by wasting the crooks' time, it has diverted them from targeting real victims, while also providing intelligence on the tactics the fraudsters try to use against their targets. And it's good to hear about a worthwhile application of AI for a change. "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," VMO2 director of fraud Murray Mackenzie said in a supplied remark.
Now if only O2 could find ingenious solutions to tackle other problems – like customer service waiting times. ®.
