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Phone scammers, beware. Your days of targeting unsuspecting seniors may be numbered, thanks to an ingenious AI tool designed to turn the tables on these fraudsters.
Meet Daisy, the AI-powered “grandma” created by O2, the UK’s largest mobile network operator.
This clever chatbot is engineered to convincingly impersonate a chatty elderly woman, keeping scammers engaged in pointless conversations while wasting their time.
According to TechSpot, Daisy’s secret sauce lies in her ability to listen to callers, transcribe their voices to text, and generate responses using a custom large language model (LLM) imbued with a “grandma” personality.
Her answers are then converted back into a voice using an AI text-to-speech model, all in real-time. The result? Interactions so realistic that scammers are getting royally duped. They often remain on the line for up to 40 minutes, growing increasingly frustrated and profane.
But Daisy isn’t a lone wolf. She’s part of a growing trend of “scambaiting” AI tools being developed to fight phone fraud.
For instance, researchers in Australia have created an AI chatbot that mimics human speech to engage with scammers, making their schemes less profitable.
And in the UK, Virgin Media O2 is leveraging Daisy as part of a broader arsenal of AI-powered fraud-fighting tools, including spam call detection and firewalls to block scam texts.
While these developments are promising, they highlight the escalating arms race between fraud-fighters and scammers. As AI tools become more sophisticated, so do criminal tactics.
For example, this CBS News report shows how scammers now use AI to clone voices, creating convincing impersonations of loved ones to trick victims into handing over money or personal info.
And in a chilling twist, AI-generated “deepfake” audio and video are making it increasingly difficult to discern genuine communications from fraudulent ones. It’s like, really bad. Bad enough that the FCC issued a public service announcement.
As we navigate this brave new world of AI-powered fraud and counter-fraud measures, one thing is clear: staying one step ahead of scammers will require constant innovation and vigilance.
So, the next time you receive a suspicious call from “Grandma,” it might just be an AI-powered scammer trap on the other end.
What do you think about AI-powered scam-fighting tools like Daisy? Can they really turn the tables on phone fraudsters? Share your thoughts in the comments below
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