Video: AI granny wasting scammers’ time

British phone company O2 has created a new artificial intelligence to slowly but surely drive phone scammers mad. Celebrated on social media, AI granny wastes the time of fraudsters - and in true English fashion, she is both polite and a bit of a dab hand at the same time.

AI Grandma Daisy Harris' method is ingenious. Instead of pressing charges or threatening to call a lawyer, Harris asks the scammers for help - after all, she has no idea about the technology, but is keen to learn all she can about it. Meanwhile, over a cup of tea and English biscuits, she tells the annoyed con artists about her cat, Fluffy, and her flower garden.

That's more or less how it works, although not every trickster appreciates granny Harris' fine, eccentric manner and can become insulting after an hour's conversation. But that doesn't bother a real lady.

Listening to the recordings, you could almost feel sorry for them. Instead of bank details, passwords or other personal information, all the scammers might get is a recipe for delicious biscuits. If you want to listen to the calls for yourself and have a bit of fun, check out the video below.

If you follow the comments section on social media sites like Instagram, it is clear that the majority are celebrating granny Harris as an ingenious heroine, with some even claiming that it is the first truly useful invention in the field of AI.

AI granny: Inspired by an O2 employee's grandmother

The nice old lady approach is not new. Many have long tried to distract scammers by pretending to be their potential victims and, for example, distracting them with fake questions.

This tactic is also known as "scambaiting" and is used not only to steal the fraudsters' time, but also to gather information for law enforcement. But real people's time is limited - not a problem for Daisy Harris, who can play the game over and over again.

“These people can’t just talk to thousands of scammers. But there’s an idea that A.I. can.” Explains Morten Legarth, developer of Daisy in collaboration with London-based advertising agency VCCP.

The voice of the naive lady is actually that of an O2 employee's grandmother, who was invited to record many, many dialogues - over a cup of tea, of course. "I learnt a lot from my grandmother. She used to talk about the birds in her garden," says Ben Hopkins, who also worked on the VCCP project.

According to the security company Hiya, around 70 million fraudulent calls are made worldwide every day. In 2023, 16 % of UK consumers alone were victims of phone scams, losing them an average of €768 (£634) per person. According to a British study, fraudulent calls particularly affect people over 75.