Meet Daisy, a friendly 75-year-old woman who makes scammers waste time on the phone

The elderly are the favorite victims of scammers and embezzlers. These heartless beings take advantage of elderly people’s poor understanding of technology and banking processes to obtain important data, resulting in loans that the victims obviously cannot repay. Well, nothing more ironic if there was a smart old lady who didn’t fall for the scammers’ tricks but, instead, put the scammers in the ring and trapped them for as long as possible.

Well, this old lady exists! But it’s not flesh and blood, of course. I present Daisyan artificial intelligence bot developed by Virgin Media O2, with the specific mission of keep fraudsters busy on the phone for as long as possible. Programmed to sound like a kind, chatty grandma, Daisy is the newest weapon against phone scams.

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How does Grandma Daisy work?

With complicated stories about her family, her passion for knitting, and even fictitious banking details, Daisy tricks scammers into wasting precious minutes that could be being used to scam real victims. According to Virgin Media O2, the bot was able to keep fraudsters on the line for up to 40 minutes, time they could not use to harm others.

The idea of ​​the bot is simple: keep the scammer on the line for as long as possible. Daisy operates 24 hours a day, and anyone who suspects an attempted scam can forward the call to a specific O2 number, which connects the bot to the fraudster. The partnership between the operator and YouTuber Jim Browning, known for exposing telephone scams, resulted in an intelligent and humorous tool to combat criminals.

Daisy is programmed to respond to scammers in a natural and convincing way, generating real-time responses based on what the fraudsters say. It aims to create long-form conversations, using what Virgin Media O2 describes as “an engaging narrative from a proud grandma”. Thus, the bot pretends to believe everything the fraudster says, just to keep the conversation going.

Elderly people are the main targets

It is worth mentioning that telephone scams are a serious problem, not only in the United Kingdom, but in many parts of the world, including Brazil. Elderly people are one of the main targets of these criminals, who use social engineering techniques to deceive victims and obtain personal data. In the United Kingdom, 40% of scam victims are elderly, while in Brazil property fraud against the elderly has also become frequent, according to data from the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship.

However, Daisy is not available to the general public. The tool was designed to deal exclusively with scammers and requires high computational power to operate, something that, for now, limits its availability. Even so, Virgin Media O2 hopes that the impact of the awareness campaign promoted by the use of Daisy will help the public understand the risks of scams and better protect themselves.

So while Daisy does her job, the lesson is clear: you can’t be too careful with suspicious calls. And, if you don’t have a “grandma” like Daisy to fool scammers, it’s best to always be wary of strange offers and requests over the phone.

Fonte: Mashable