Why trust Greenbot
Virgin Media O2 has found an unexpected hero in the fight against phone scammers: an artificial intelligence (AI) bot named Daisy. By mimicking an elderly person, Daisy uses her charm and seemingly endless patience to keep scammers on the phone for as long as possible.
It’s a creative way to help protect vulnerable individuals from fraud—and Daisy seems to be very good at it.
Keeping Scammers Busy with Endless Charm
Scambaiter Daisy is part of Virgin Media O2’s ongoing “Swerve the Scammers” campaign, launched to coincide with International Fraud Awareness Week. Daisy will waste scammers’ time by engaging them in pointless conversations, preventing them from targeting real people. Daisy taps into fraudsters’ common practice of preying on older adults. She’s even been dubbed O2’s “Head of Scammer Relations” for her efforts in combatting fraud.
Daisy can hold scammers on the line for up to 40 minutes. She will ramble on about her fictional grandchildren or her love for knitting and her kitten Fluffy—all while fabricating and digressing from revealing any sensitive information. In one recorded call, a scammer raged, “It’s nearly been an hour,” to which Daisy replied calmly, “Gosh, how time flies.”
Training Daisy involved collaborating with popular YouTube scambaiter, Jim Browning. Virgin Media O2 used his expertise in real scam calls to make her responses more realistic. “Daisy combines various AI models which work together to listen and respond to fraudulent calls instantaneously and is so lifelike it has successfully kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time,” O2 explained in the announcement post.
Daisy Exposes Scam Tactics
The rise in scam attempts makes Daisy’s job all the more important. Virgin Media O2’s research found that one in five Brits experiences a scam attempt each week, with 67% of people worried about being targeted. Many are eager to fight back against scammers but lack the time. In fact, 71% of British citizens say they’d love to retaliate, but not if it means wasting their own time. That’s where Daisy comes in, doing the scambaiting for them.
“I know first-hand just how sophisticated nasty fraudsters can be, that’s why I’ve teamed up with O2 and AI Scambaiter Daisy to take the fight back to them, keeping them busy with calls going nowhere,” said TV star Amy Heart, who partnered with O2 for a promotional video on Daisy. Amy herself once fell victim to a scam that drained £5,000 from her bank account.
Virgin Media O2 emphasizes that Daisy serves another purpose: educating the public on scam tactics. Daisy’s interactions with scammers help expose common fraud techniques, offering valuable insights on how people can protect themselves. The company encourages customers to report any suspected scam texts or calls to the number 7726, so that it can take appropriate actions against these.
Though Daisy alone can’t completely solve the problem of phone scams, she’s certainly making life more difficult for fraudsters. And Virgin Media O2 hopes that her success will inspire similar AI-driven efforts in the future.
