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‘Dear, did you say pastry?’: meet the ‘AI granny’ driving scammers up the wall


Daisy’s dithering frustrates phone fraudsters and wastes time they could be using to scam real people

An elderly grandmother who chats about knitting patterns, recipes for scones and the blackness of the night sky to anyone who will listen has become an unlikely tool in combatting scammers. Using a mixture of ambivalence, confusion about how computers work and an eagerness to reminisce about her younger days, the “78 years young” Daisy draws sighs and snapping from fraudsters on the other end of the line. Behind the affable “hoping to” is an AI system which has been trained on real scam calls, said Virgin Media O2’s marketing director, Simon Valcarcel.

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