AI 'Granny' Created to Waste Scammers' Time

British telecom Virgin Media O2 debuts Daisy, an AI chatbot designed to engage phone scammers in lengthy, unproductive conversations.

Daisy, an AI-powered chatbot with a grandmotherly persona, was launched by Virgin Media O2 to combat phone scams by wasting scammers' time.
The AI uses a custom language model and mimics the voice and behavior of an elderly woman, engaging scammers in rambling, human-like conversations.
Daisy operates through phone numbers shared on scammer-targeted lists, keeping fraudsters on calls for extended periods, sometimes up to 40 minutes.
Developed with input from advertising agency VCCP, Daisy’s voice and personality were inspired by real-life grandmothers and trained on hours of recorded dialogue.
While Daisy disrupts scammers' operations, experts caution that it is a small-scale solution given the vast scale of global phone scams, which accounted for over $1 trillion in losses last year.