O2 launches AI “grandma” to keep fraudsters on the line


The AI grandmother has reportedly kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time.

O2, a UK telecoms operator owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin Media, has employed a new strategy to combat scammers, aiming to beat them at their own game.

The company has created “Daisy,” a human-like AI ‘Granny’ which answers fraudsters' calls in real time.

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According to O2, AI Granny’s mission is to talk with scammers and waste as much of their time as possible with human-like chat to keep them away from real people.

Daisy, which was reportedly trained by one of YouTube’s best-known scam baiters, Jim Browning, combines various AI models to listen and respond to fraudulent calls.

Responses are then generated through a custom large language model complete with a character personality layer and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate a voice answer.

O2 claims that Daisy has kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time.

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“AI Scambaiter has told frustrated scammers meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting, and provided exasperated callers with false personal information including made-up bank details,” the company says.

According to O2 statistics, 69% of Brits reported that they’d been targeted by scammers.

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