The British telecommunications giant Virgin Media O2 recently launched ‘Daisy’, a revolutionary human-like chatbot designed to combat scams. Designed to mimic the conversational style of a wise and witty grandmother, Daisy interacts with scammers in real-time, wasting her time and resources. Conformable ForbesDaisy automates the practice of “scambaiting,” a tactic in which individuals pose as potential victims to limit scammers’ time, publicly expose their tactics, gather intelligence for law enforcement, and disrupt the scammers’ device algorithms.

Daisy works by answering calls in real time, mimicking human conversation to engage scammers, ultimately reducing the number of successful scams and protecting vulnerable consumers. This not only wastes their time, but also gathers valuable data for law enforcement, helping to disrupt scammers’ operations.

This AI-powered chatbot looks at an older adult, as older people are often targeted by scammers because they are perceived to be less tech-savvy. Daisy’s digital existence allows her to interact with crooks around the clock, uninterrupted by human needs like sleep or personal hygiene.

“While they’re busy talking to me, I can’t cheat on you and let’s face it honey, I’ve got all the time in the world,” the bot says in the intro video from O2. The video shows Daisy as a photorealistic AI-generated woman with gray hair, glasses and pearls, chatting on a pink retro landline.

Watch the video here:

The video also captures the real-life exchanges between Daisy and the frustrated crooks. As Daisy talks to the crooks, she avoids divulging sensitive information like bank account and credit card numbers. Instead, she steered the conversations to mundane topics. As a result, the scammers become increasingly irritated as Daisy enthusiastically chats about her cat, Fluffy, or goes off on long tangents about her family, knitting hobbies or false personal details.

Notably, Daisy has a dedicated phone number strategically added to scammers’ contact lists by O2’s anti-fraud team. This smart setup allows Daisy to engage with fraudsters by using advanced AI technology to listen to voice-to-text callers and respond convincingly using a customized large language model.

Daisy’s personality is created to resemble a sweet British granny, thanks to a layer of “personality” to the character. To perfect her authentic tone, London-based creative agency VCCP Faith took inspiration from a staff member’s grandmother, replicating her voice to create the believable character of Daisy.

“By tricking criminals into thinking they’re defrauding a real person and playing on scammers’ biases about the elderly, Daisy has prevented them from targeting real victims and, most importantly, revealed the common tactics used to trick customers into can protect better.” O2 said in a statement.