According to the telecommunications company O222% of Britons have experienced a fraud attempt every week and 67% are worried about being the target of one. To help in this area, the teleoperator has developed “Daisy”, a grandmother created with generative artificial intelligence to keep scammers at bay.
As the brand explains, “Daisy” is the new member of its fraud prevention team, and has taken on the role of “director of fraudster relations.” Its mission is talk to those looking to commit fraud and waste as much time as possible with incoherent conversations similar to those they might have with humans with the intention of keeping them away from real people.
The development has been carried out together with faiththe creative artificial intelligence agency of VCCP, and is part of the “Swerve the Scammers” campaign (Avoid scammers). The company’s goal with “Daisy” is to highlight the need for consumers to remain alert to fraud.
As VCCP London explains in a statement, “Daisy” has been created by combining a selection of generative models and training an LLM to form their personality and knowledge base. Additionally, her voice was modeled after that of a team member’s grandmother to ensure complete credibility. Your image has been generated by custom training a diffusion model, creating a photorealistic character for the campaign.
This particular AI has also been trained with the help of content creator Jim Browning, who specializes in scams.
O2 claims that “Daisy” is difficult to distinguish from a real person and has already put her to the test for a week interacting with scammers in real time without any intervention from its creators. He notes that he has managed to keep numerous scammers in conversation for 40 minutes straight, during which he has talked about his family, his passion for sewing and provided false personal information, including made-up bank details.
In this way, according to the company, “Daisy” has served to entertain and has exposed the common tactics used to make customers can better protect themselves. All of this is collected in the audiovisual piece about these letters, starring the influencer Amy Hart, who was a victim of fraud.
The teleoperator points out that the initiative has been created in response to new research of its own which reveals that 71% of Britons would like to take revenge on scammers who have tried to deceive them or their loved ones, but not wanting to waste their own time is ranked as the main reason for not doing it.
O2 and the fight against fraud
“Fundamentally, Daisy is a reminder that, no matter how persuasive the person on the other end of the phone may be, they are not always who you think they are.”; commented Murray Mackenzie, Director of Fraud at Virgin Media O2. “With scammers operating full-time call centers specifically to target Brits, we urge everyone to remain vigilant”.
Beyond “Daisy”, O2 has released AI-powered anti-spam tools and new free caller id services to help customers protect themselves. It has made available the toll-free number 7726, to which users can forward calls or text messages and thus help the company perfect the blocking of suspicious contacts.
Last year alone, Virgin Media O2 says it blocked 89 million text messages, partly thanks to 7726, and intercepted and blocked more than £250 million worth of suspected fraud transactions – the equivalent of stopping one every two minutes.
Furthermore, the company calls on the British government to take responsibility to stop fraud by appointing a dedicated minister and creating a single, centralized, specialized and adequately resourced national police body responsible for investigating all cases of fraud.
