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More surprising than the hikes in scams aimed at the vulnerable-seniors and so many others-are the statistics, which are astonishing. Just last year, the Federal Trade Commission reported US consumers lost a record $10 billion to fraud-an increase of 14 percent over the year before. The UK also saw a rise in fraud attempts on the elderly. According to a survey, over two-thirds of the UK residents older than 75 said they experienced at least one fraudulent attempt in the last six months. The scaring stats is that about 40% of those respondents said the fraud attempts came in very frequently.
In response to this rapidly unfolding crisis Virgin Media O2 has just launched an ingenious product designed to combat fraudsters. The product comes in the form of an AI-generated elderly grandmother. This character, known as “Daisy,” is gaining the upper hand on scammers by simply wasting their time.
“Just keeping the scammers talking,” says Daisy. She keeps them on the phone preventing them from fraudulently targeting other, more vulnerable victims.
Daisy was developed using other, equivalent advanced AI models like ChatGPT, able to hold long, rambling conversations in a human-like way. The objective is to extend the period for which the scammer stays on the phone, by having Daisy engage them in conversations regarding her fictitious knitting hobby, family members, and fabricated life stories. The longer he spends chatting with Daisy, the less time he has to dupe a real person into his schemes.
Murray Mackenzie, Fraud Director at Virgin Media O2 explained the tactic in this recent blog post: “The newest member of our fraud-prevention team, Daisy, is turning the tables on scammers—outsmarting and outmaneuvering them at their own cruel game simply by keeping them on the line.”
Daisy’s point is to be as uninteresting as possible. If she were to continue long-winded, pointless chit-chat over things like her “cute fluffy” cat or personal stories, then she can really get on someone’s nerves or distract a scammer from what he really wants to do. In return, the scammer has to be kept on hold for much longer than he had anticipated.
Here’s how Daisy works: It all comes down to the technology behind the AI Grandmother:
The system was driven by a few layers of artificial intelligence that would work in harmony with one another. First, the voice-to-text model would catch what the scammer had to say, as Daisy transcribed their speech. Next, the AI system would start processing the text and would use that to generate a response. The response would be vocalized through a text-to-speech system that sounded exactly like an elderly woman but all of this happened in a matter of seconds so that the scammer thought they were talking to a real person.
Daisy was trained with actual call recordings of scam, and consulted professional scam baiters who have been going through the process for years. It learned from them on how to waste a scammer’s time by giving them useless and fabricated responses, thus outlasting them and frustrating them. An important design decision was the nature of Daisy’s character. The reason is scammers attempt to scam more seniors than teenagers. Creating a character that would seemingly be a plausible victim had Virgin Media O2 ensured this, but Daisy was thereby an effective tool in combating these crimes.
It can then be noted that the conversations Daisy has are well conversational for scammers, whereby, in some cases, AI kept the scammers on the line for more than 40 minutes-roughly twice as long as a scammer wished to keep the conversation.
This is also an extended engagement because a scammer is squandering his valuable time scamming Daisy and not a real, vulnerable victim.
Real-World Impact: A New Defense Against Fraud
The UK has documented different scammed tactics these fraudulent people apply to their unsuspecting victims. Most of these end in loss of money or confidential information to the victim. Virgin Media O2 responds to this by giving a people direct access to fighting the prevalent tactic. In the ultimate waste of time for the scammer who should not scam others again, the targeted caller forwards to Daisy’s hotline the number 7726. The AI would thus interact with the scammer after Daisy receives the call from the scammer, preventing the possibility of further calls to scam others.
Now is the most crucial moment for this initiative. According to O2’s own research, one in five people from all around the UK states that they are targeted by a scam call every week. The more AI-based scams advance, the more consumers need to arm themselves with new means to counter the attack. By wasting time and harassing the scammer with endless options, Daisy may be able to avert the occurrence of as few successful attacks as possible which should emerge from the AI generation.
The Rise of AI in Scams: Double-Edged Sword
While Daisy represents an innovative step towards combating fraud, AI technology is being used by fraudsters to offer more advanced attacks. One of the emerging threats on the fraudster’s horizon is the use of AI “voice cloning,” whereby a scammer uses AI to mimic a person’s voice by sampling audio clips. Such cloned voices have been used for certain types of bank fraud or even wire transfer scams, where a victim of the scam believes he is talking to a loved one who may be in distress-a child, spouse, etc., and the fact ends up by paying a ransom or transferring money into the scammer’s pocket.
In extreme cases, even hardened fraudsters have made their victims fear that family members had been kidnapped or that some such general threat had befallen them, which markedly increased the urgency to act and settle in time. As pointed out by cybersecurity firm McAfee, one out of four respondents knew someone who had actually received AI voice clone scams, and the risk associated with them grew dramatically.
Against these threats, AI tools like Daisy can be an important arsenal in a fight back. For example, Daisy keeps engaging the scammers in a senseless end and may prevent them from really using their AI technology on other victims. To put it in a nutshell, Daisy will act as a catalyst in breaking the fraud ecosystem and provide new lines in a fight against AI-driven scams.
source : popsci
