Phone network employs AI "grandmother" to waste scammers' time with meandering conversations

Scambaiting, Abe Simpson-style

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In brief: Human-like AIs have brought plenty of justifiable concerns about their ability to replace human workers, but a company is turning the tech against one of humanity's biggest scourges: phone scammers. The AI imitates the criminals' most popular target, a senior citizen, who keeps the fraudsters on the phone as long as possible in conversations that go nowhere, à la Grandpa Simpson.

The creation of O2, the UK's largest mobile network operator, Daisy, or dAIsy, is an AI created to trick scammers into thinking they are talking to a real grandmother who likes to ramble. If and when the AI does hand over the demanded bank details, it reads out fake numbers and names.

The software is designed to keep people on the line for as long as possible. Not only does this mean less time for the scammers to target real humans, but O2 is also using the conversations to learn the favorite tricks and techniques used in these schemes.

As you can hear in the video, the tricksters aren't happy about being tricked – they become increasingly angry and sweary. The bot is so convincing that it has managed to keep some people on the phone for 40 minutes at a time.

If you've seen any of the several YouTube channels that scam scammers, sometimes by using a voice changer to sound like an old lady, you'll know what to expect. Daisy has been trained with the help of one of the platform's most popular scambaiters, Jim Browning.

"So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time"

Daisy works by listening to a caller and transcribing their voice to text. Responses are generated through a custom LLM complete with a character personality layer, and are then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate a voice answer. All of this takes place in real time.

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O2 customers aren't being given access to Daisy so they can wage their own campaign of vengeance against scammers. Instead, the AI tool has been added to a list of 'easy target' numbers used by scammers. Daisy is able to interact with callers 24/7 without any input from human controllers.

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. 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."

Daisy was created in response to research from O2 that found 71% of Brits would like to get their revenge on scammers that have tricked them or their loved ones, but most said they wouldn't engage in scambaiting as they didn't want to waste their time.

While the work being done by the AI can be applauded, its ability to converse with someone so convincingly is unnerving. Ironically, similar technology is also being used by scammers to trick people into thinking they are talking to their relatives.