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An elderly grandmother who chats about knitting patterns, recipes for scones and the blackness of the night sky to anyone who will listen has become an unlikely tool in combatting scammers.
Like many people, “Daisy” is beset with countless calls from fraudsters, who often try to take control of her computer after claiming she has been hacked.
But because of her dithering and inquiries about whether they like cups of tea, the criminals end up furious and frustrated rather than successful.
Daisy is, of course, not a real grandmother but an AI bot created by computer scientists to combat fraud. Her task is simply to waste the time of the people who are trying to scam her.
O2 rolled out “AI granny” Daisy for a short period to show what could be done with artificial intelligence to counter the scourge of scammers who have become so ubiquitous.
Using a mixture of ambivalence, confusion about how computers work and an eagerness to reminisce about her younger days, the “78 years young” Daisy draws sighs and snapping from fraudsters on the other end of the line.
In one call O2 released, a scammer tries to take control of her computer after telling her it is riddled with viruses. He is kept on the line while she looks for her glasses and bumbles about trying to turn the machine on and find the Internet Explorer icon.
“You know, back in my day we didn’t have all this technology. Everything was much simpler. What about you, dear?” she says. When he reacts with anger, saying that her “profession is bothering people”, Daisy says: “I wouldn’t want to bother anyone. I’m just trying to have a little chat.”
Another call has a scammer again trying to take control of her computer, but Daisy delays by talking about how she usually just uses it for knitting patterns and recipes for scones. “I see a lot of options, dear. It says things like back, forward, reload and, oh, what’s this? Save as. How do I find the homepage?” she asks.
When a third scammer tries to get her to download the Google Play Store, she replies: “Dear, did you say pastry? I’m not really on the right page.” She then complains that her screen has gone blank, saying it has “gone black like the night sky”.
“If you are wasting our time, ma’am, you are going to lose your money because someone is trying to take your money and we are trying to upgrade your security,” says the exasperated scammer.
When she tries to find the icon the scammer is asking her to press, she says: “I see a triangle icon, but I’m not sure if it’s the right one. It could be a slice of pie. You know, my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Let me just squint at it.”
“Do you have any lovely pastries in your area? I do adore a good scone,” she adds.
Behind the affable “hoping to” is an AI system which has been trained on real scam calls, said Virgin Media O2’s marketing director, Simon Valcarcel.
“It knows exactly the tactics to look out for, exactly the type of information to give to keep the scammers online and waste time,” he said.
The company worked with Jim Browning, a “scam baiter” who posts videos of himself wasting the time of criminals, to plant phone numbers on websites where they were likely to be found by fraudsters hoping to scam people. They included sites promoting competitions where the prizes appear “too good to be true”.
They then waited for the scam calls to start coming in – and, sure enough, after a few days they did. The results were then recorded on a laptop.
Over a few weeks, Daisy wasted each fraudster’s time for up to 40 minutes when they could otherwise have been scamming real people.
Rather than be rolled out on a much wider scale, however, Valcarcel said the project was aimed at raising awareness. Some of the scammers eventually guessed they were talking to an AI bot, but future versions could use many different types of accent and persona for Daisy.
Many fraudsters work in call centres, and if one has no luck in getting information from their victim, their details will be passed on to another, according to findings from the project. In one case, Daisy was passed between four different callers.
Artificial intelligence is being used to combat fraud across many industries now, according to Serpil Hall at Celebrus, a technology firm that deals with fraud and scams.
It is used in banking to identify unauthorised transactions and identity fraud, in insurance to verify claims, in travel to monitor unusual booking patterns and in public services to identify things such as anomalies in tax filings, she said.
