AI Scam-Baiter “Daisy” Impersonates Elderly Woman to Fight Fraud

The telecommunications provider Virgin Media O2 has unveiled a groundbreaking tool in the fight against fraudsters—an artificial intelligence system named Daisy. Designed to impersonate an elderly woman, Daisy engages scammers in real-time conversations, diverting their efforts and preventing harm to actual customers.

Trained using advanced techniques and inspired by videos of prominent scam-baiting experts, Daisy’s primary mission is to occupy fraudsters’ time with meaningless discussions. The AI employs multiple sophisticated models to instantly comprehend speech and respond seamlessly. Its replies are so convincingly lifelike that it can keep scammers on the line for up to 40 minutes.

Daisy has already left fraudsters astonished, steering their conversations into tangents about knitting, family anecdotes, or even providing fictitious banking information—all to thwart real attacks on customers. The system operates through a custom language model enhanced with personality traits, translating responses into speech using state-of-the-art voice synthesis technology.

Reality TV star Amy Hart, herself a victim of fraud, has joined the project to raise awareness and support others in avoiding such scams. Hart collaborated with Daisy in a video that illustrates how fraudsters attempt to deceive unsuspecting individuals.

This initiative is a cornerstone of Virgin Media O2’s Swerve the Scammers campaign, launched in response to research revealing that while 71% of Britons wish to stand up to scammers, 53% are unwilling to invest their own time in doing so. By leveraging AI, the burden of scam-baiting has been shifted from people to technology.

Virgin Media O2 has also called on the government to establish a centralized hub for combating fraud, as the issue continues to escalate. Nearly 69% of Britons have encountered scam attempts, and last year, the company prevented over £250 million worth of fraud while blocking 89 million suspicious texts, thanks to customer reports.