Daisy the AI 'granny scambaiter' joins the fight against phone scammers

No matter where you stand on artificial intelligence, you can't deny it has its moments. Imagine dreaming up an AI-powered older woman who can outwit scammers. That's exactly what 02's latest initiative does.

Created by VCCP's AI creative agency, Faith, 'Daisy' is the newest member of 02's fraud prevention team. She takes real-time calls from suspected scammers, keeping them on the line and away from genuine customers.

This campaign, believed to be the first of its kind, comes in response to a study by Strand Partners showing that one in five Brits face a fraud attempt weekly. Based on a real-life relative of a VCCP team member, Daisy plays on scammers' stereotypes of elderly targets. Though anyone can fall victim to a scam, fraud gangs often focus on the elderly. By tapping into scammers' biases, Daisy becomes the ultimate "scambaiter".

Scammers – many posing as trusted UK companies – think they've found an easy target, but Daisy turns the tables. As part of an awareness campaign, she answers their calls, wasting their time and revealing their tactics. Over the course of many conversations, Daisy has shared stories of her family, discussed her love of knitting, introduced her cat, and even provided fabricated personal details. By convincing scammers they're defrauding a real person, Daisy prevents them from reaching genuine targets and helps educate the public on common fraud tactics.

To develop Daisy, O2 and Faith collaborated with top UK scambaiter Jim Browning, equipping her with the tactics to keep fraudsters on the line for over 40 minutes. Daisy's personality and knowledge base were crafted through generative language models, while a VCCP staff member's grandmother inspired her voice. Visually, she was brought to life using a custom-trained diffusion model, creating a photo-real AI character who's ready to outsmart scammers.

"At O2, we're deeply invested in fighting fraud. Daisy is our secret weapon: indistinguishable from a real person and dedicated to wasting scammers' time," says Simon Valcarcel from Virgin Media 02, adding: "With scammers operating full-time call centres, we all need to stay cautious and forward dodgy calls and messages to 7726 for free."

Daisy was launched alongside a two-minute hero film and shorter clips for social media, and O2 has partnered with former Love Islander Amy Hart, a scam victim herself, to raise awareness. Targeting a Gen-Z audience who may feel too savvy to fall for scams, Amy's involvement really hits the message home that anyone can be tricked.

O2, which blocks millions of fraudulent texts and calls each month, has also introduced AI-powered spam-fighting tools and enhanced caller ID services for free to all customers. For additional tips and advice, visit o2.co.uk/swervethescammers.