A lady with a phone looking a little confused or surprised

O2 takes on scammers with AI scambaiter

With VCCP, O2 has created an AI-powered tool named Daisy. Almost indistinguishable from a human, she keeps bad actors at bay

By Creative Salon

14 November 2024

With one in five Brits (22%) experiencing a fraud attempt every single week*, O2 and VCCP’s AI creative agency faith have today launched a first of its kind campaign to fight back against scammers.

At the heart of the campaign is Daisy, a lifelike, state-of-the-art, Conversational AI designed to speak with scammers and keep them on the phone for as long as possible so they have less time to try and scam real people.

The newest member of O2’s fraud prevention team, Daisy was created using a range of cutting-edge AI technology and is indistinguishable from a real person. Based on a real-life relative of a VCCP employee to ensure total believability, Daisy was built to play on scammers’ own stereotypical views that older people are easier targets for scams. Whilst anyone can be a victim of a scam, criminal fraud gangs often target the elderly, so by leaning into scammers' own biases, Daisy became the perfect scambaiter.

Phoney fraudsters - including many posing as some of the UK’s most trusted businesses - thought they’d got their hands on an easy target, but Daisy has been beating them at their own horrible game - answering scam calls and wasting scammers calls as part of an awareness campaign which exposes fraudsters tricks and tactics and offers top tips on how to avoid scammers.

Daisy is able to interact in real-time ensuring no suspicions are raised on the other end of the line, and has worked 24/7, and over the course of many hours of scam calls she’s told meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting and provided false personal information including made-up bank details. By tricking the scammers into thinking they were defrauding a real person, Daisy has prevented scammers from targeting real victims and exposed the common tactics used so customers can learn what to watch out for.

O2 and faith worked with leading UK scambaiter Jim Browning to ensure Daisy was armed with the best information and tactics that kept some phone scammers on the line for more than forty minutes - having followed Jim’s expert advice on how to attract dodgy calls.

Daisy herself was created by combining a selection of generative models, a LLM was trained to inform her personality and knowledgebase, and her voice was modelled on a VCCP staff member’s grandmother to ensure total believability. She was brought to life visually by custom-training a diffusion model, creating a photo-real character for the campaign, along with a cutting edge image-to-video model to make her move.

Simon Valcarcel, marketing director at Virgin Media O2, said “At O2, we’ve been investing heavily in the fightback against fraud and this campaign demonstrates the lengths we’re willing to go to keep our customers safe. I’m thrilled to launch the newest member of our fraud team, Daisy: She’s our secret weapon against scammers - indistinguishable from a real person, an AI hiding in plain sight, dedicated to wasting fraudsters time!”

“Yet she also shows no matter how persuasive callers seem, they aren’t always who you think they are – so we all must remain vigilant. With scammers operating full-time call centres specifically to target Brits, we’re urging everyone to leave the scambaiting to the professionals and instead help play their part by forwarding-on dodgy calls and messages to 7726 for free.”

Scambaiter Daisy has been created in response to new research from O2 revealing 7 in 10 (71%) of Brits would like to get their own back against scammers that have tried to trick them or their loved ones*. However, wasting their own time ranked the top reason why they wouldn’t bait scammers themselves in future (53%)*.

A PR-first campaign, a two minute hero film has been created showing Daisy in action with two, shorter, 30 second cut downs created to run on meta and TikTok.

As part of the campaign, O2 is also working with Former Love Islander and scam victim, Amy Hart, to expose fraudsters' crooked tactics and help O2 customers swerve the scammers. Amy was herself scammed and her involvement aims to help the brand connect to the Gen-Z audience who often think themselves too tech-savvy to fall for phone scams.

O2 blocks millions of fraudulent texts and calls from reaching customers' phones every month and is releasing new AI-powered spam-fighting tools and enhanced caller identification services for free to all mobile customers to help protect them. To help make life easier for customers, O2 has launched a new webpage offering tips, tricks, and advice so they know what to look out for.