An AI granny is phone scammers’ worst nightmare

LONDON - Ms Daisy Harris likes birds – there is one outside her window. Her cat is named Fluffy, and she would love to tell you about her knitting hobby. She likes tea and biscuits. And she just cannot seem to figure out this internet thing.

But perhaps you can explain it just one more time?

That is the general vibe of a chat with Ms Daisy Harris, an AI-generated granny unveiled in November by the big British phone company O2, as part of its efforts to curb phone scammers.

She does not have a badge, or a warrant, or any way to really stop them. But when an unlucky fraudster dials her number, Ms Daisy does have the power to waste unlimited amounts of their time.

There are plenty of human scambaiters out there – people who identify would-be thieves and turn the tables, leading them on meandering conversations that keep them from calling other potential victims. Unlike them, Ms Daisy is free of encumbrances like the need to sleep.

“These people can’t just talk to thousands of scammers,” said Mr Morten Legarth, who helped develop Ms Daisy with VCCP, an advertising agency in London. “But there’s an idea that AI can.”

Phone scams have reached mind-boggling levels. Tens of millions of scam calls rocketed around the world every day in 2023, according to the phone security company Hiya.

An anti-scam consortium says that more than US$1 trillion (S$1.34 trillion) was stolen, often when targets unsuspectingly turned over bank details, passwords or other personal information.

The internet has only made these schemes easier, and while scammers do not discriminate, older adults are seen as easy prey. In one British study, 40 per cent of people older than 75 reported getting scam calls at least monthly, if not daily.

Ms Daisy, with her befuddlement about technology and eagerness to engage, is meant to come across, at least initially, as the perfect target. Her developers said they leaned into expectations, often using their own grandmothers for inspiration.

“I drew a lot from my gran. She always went on about the birds in her garden,” said Mr Ben Hopkins, who also worked on the VCCP project. Instead of using a voice actor to train Ms Daisy, the team opted to use one of its colleagues’ grandmothers, who came in for some tea and recorded hours of dialogue.

A prolific scambaiter based in Northern Ireland who posts on YouTube under the name Jim Browning worked with O2 and VCCP in developing Ms Daisy, pumping her full of techniques to keep scammers on the phone. Among them include going on lots of tangents on topics like hobbies and your family, and feign technological ineptitude.

In one instance, three phone scammers teamed up on a call that lasted nearly an hour, trying to get Ms Daisy to type “www.” into a web browser.

Still, given the sheer volume of scam calls, Ms Daisy’s efforts are less a blockade than a small speed bump.

O2 customers cannot forward shady calls to Ms Daisy. Instead, she answers a few different phone numbers out of the vast haystack of digits that scammers can dial.

“Although it does disrupt operations on a practical level, it doesn’t stop fraud more broadly in any meaningful sense,” said Dr Elisabeth Carter, an associate professor of criminology and a forensic linguist at Kingston University London.

Dr Carter advised against trying to follow Ms Daisy’s lead in messing with scammers. As satisfying as it may feel, “the best thing to do if you receive a call from a fraudster is to not engage, to hang up and report it,” she said. NYTIMES