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How an AI granny is combating phone scams

  • CNN
  • November 26, 2024
London

CNN

 — 

At first glance, Daisy looks like your stereotypical grandmother: She loves knitting and talking about her family, has a cat named Fluffy, is technologically inept and has plenty of time to shoot the breeze.

But dig a little deeper, and you'll find her to be exceptionally tech-enabled, with a few cunning tricks up her sleeve.

That's because Daisy is a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot created by British mobile phone company O2 to help combat fraud by tricking phone scammers into thinking they are speaking to a real person.

Her debut earlier this month highlights how AI is being used both positively and negatively when it comes to online scams.

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a lobby group, consumers worldwide lost more than $1 trillion to online scams last year. A record $12.5 billion in losses from online scams was reported to the FBI in 2023, the bureau said in a report in March.

Daisy's mission, according to O2, "is to talk with fraudsters and waste as much of their time as possible with human-like rambling chat to keep them away from real people." Her tactics have kept "numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time," the company said in a statement unveiling Daisy earlier this month.

"With scammers operating fulltime call centres specifically to target Brits, we're urging everyone to remain vigilant," commented Murray Mackenzie, Virgin Media O2's director of fraud.

Last year, Virgin Media O2, the wider telecommunications group, blocked more than £250 million ($315 million) in suspected fraudulent transactions, which they say is equivalent to stopping one every two minutes.