O2 targets scammers with their Daisy AI “Granny”
O2 aims to protect their customers by using AI to waste the time of fraudsters
Scam calls are a sad fact of life, but Virgin Media O2 has enlisted the help of “Daisy” to keep fraudsters away from potential victims. Daisy is a new AI “Granny” from O2 that’s designed to do one thing: waste the time of scammers. Scam calls are diverted to the Daisy AI, which talks to scammers and keeps them engaged, preventing them from scamming others.
Virgin Media O2 trained this AI with the help of Jim Browning, one of YouTube’s best-known “Scambaiters.” Thanks to the power of AI, Daisy is “completely indistinguishable from a real person,” reacting to scammers in real time without the input of its creators. Daisy is so lifelike that she has managed to keep fraudsters on calls for over 40 minutes at a time. That’s time these scammers can’t target other potential victims.
This new AI is part of O2’s “Swerve the Scammers” campaign. Recent research found that 7 of 10 Brits would like to “get their own back against scammers.” This research also found that 22% of Brits were targeted by scams every week. Daisy is part of O2’s efforts to fight back. Furthermore, Virgin Media O2 has called on the UK government to appoint a dedicated Fraud Minister to help investigate and prevent fraud.
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.
O2 wants your help to make its Daisy AI more effective
As effective as Daisy is, she needs assistance. O2 is encouraging Brits to forward suspected scam calls and text messages to 7726. Doing this allows O2 to investigate these numbers and block them. This will also help them divert calls to their Daisy AI to waste the time of these fraudsters. Last year alone, Virgin Media O2 claims to have blocked 89 million scam texts, thanks in part to users forwarding suspected scam calls/texts to 7726.
O2 has called on its users to remain vigilant and to report suspected fraud calls and texts to 7726.
You can join the discussion on O2 targeting fraudsters with their time-wasting Daisy AI on the OC3D Forums.
