Simon Willison’s Weblog

4th January 2025 - Link Blog

O2 unveils Daisy, the AI granny wasting scammers’ time (via) Bit of a surprising press release here from 14th November 2024: Virgin Media O2 (the UK companies merged in 2021) announced their entrance into the scambaiting game:

Daisy combines various AI models which work together to listen and respond to fraudulent calls instantaneously and is so lifelike it has successfully kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time.

Hard to tell from the press release how much this is a sincere ongoing project as opposed to a short-term marketing gimmick.

After several weeks of taking calls in the run up to International Fraud Awareness Week (November 17-23), the 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.

They worked with YouTube scambaiter Jim Browning, who tweeted about Daisy here.