'Worst nightmare' AI Granny deployed to combat phone scammers in the best way possible

Phone scammers are only becoming more frequent and sophisticated, especially with the rise of AI-powered tools that can manipulate a scammer's voice into sounding like a loved one. However, AI can also be used to thwart scammers, and the easiest way to get back at scammers is to keep them on the phone, as that costs them money.

UK telecommunications company Virgin Media O2 knows the next best thing besides shutting down scammers completely is keeping them on the phone, as it means that the scammer isn't on the phone with a potential victim who could lose their life savings. In what seems like a stroke of genius, Virgin Media has unveiled a new AI entity designed to take on the persona of a confused grandmother.

The AI sounds like a grandmother, responds like a grandmother, and is simply designed to waste as much of the scammer's time as possible with constant ramblings about topics that have nothing to do with what the scammer is trying to do.

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The beauty of using an elderly person's persona is that it is what a scammer would consider a prime target, which means they will likely stay on the phone for as long as possible. The AI granny is called Daisy, and according to the company behind the project, Daisy will automatically connect to likely scam callers across its network.

"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. Created using a range of cutting-edge AI technology and trained with the help of one of YouTube's best known scambaiters, Jim Browning, Daisy is a lifelike AI Granny completely indistinguishable from a real person," wrote Virgin Media

Daisy changes the subject from what the scammer wants to side stories about her family and love of knitting, and when she is asked for bank information, the AI provides a random set of numbers. Daisy has already been able to keep scammers on the line for as long as 40 minutes.

"By tricking the criminals into thinking they were defrauding a real person and playing on scammers' biases about older people, Daisy has prevented them from targeting real victims," read the Virgin blog

"But crucially, Daisy is also a reminder that no matter how persuasive someone on the other end of the phone may be, they aren't always who you think they are," Virgin fraud director Murray Mackenzie added