Virgin Media O2 Deploys AI Decoy To Waste Scammers' Time (pcmag.com) 34
British telecom Virgin Media O2 has deployed an AI tool to combat phone scammers by wasting their time with fake conversations, the company said. The AI system, named Daisy, uses voice synthesis to mimic an elderly woman and engages fraudsters in lengthy discussions about fictitious family members or provides false bank details, keeping them occupied for up to 40 minutes per call.
Virgin Media O2 embedded phone numbers connected to Daisy within scammer call lists targeting vulnerable individuals. The system, developed with help from anti-scam YouTuber Jim Browning, automatically transcribes incoming calls and generates responses without human intervention.
Further reading: Google Rolls Out Call Screening AI To Thwart Phone Fraudsters.
Virgin Media O2 embedded phone numbers connected to Daisy within scammer call lists targeting vulnerable individuals. The system, developed with help from anti-scam YouTuber Jim Browning, automatically transcribes incoming calls and generates responses without human intervention.
Further reading: Google Rolls Out Call Screening AI To Thwart Phone Fraudsters.
Daisy and Lenny (Score:5, Insightful)
What a pair.
For those who don't know Lenny: https://www.lennytroll.com/ [lennytroll.com]
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My first thought too
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Daisy better have ducks...
Doing this instead of IPv6 support (Score:2, Offtopic)
"provides false bank details" (Score:3)
so virgin media does bank fraud? (Score:2)
so virgin media does bank fraud?
Re: so virgin media does bank fraud? (Score:3)
That wouldn't be fraud, it's notifying the bank(s) involved to flag the account as itself likely being used for fraudulent purposes, at the very least freezing the account (and the fraud activity) until a review is conducted. Basically put up a red flag that may lead to yet more red flags that gum up the fraudster's enterprise.
Banks (Score:5, Funny)
Kitboga goes the extra mile and creates fake bank web sites. He has the scammers enter in their bank details themselves, which then gets forwarded to the appropriate authorities.
My favorite videos are the sisyphean-level captcha setups he has the scammers jump through to access his fake bank or bitcoin wallet. At the beginning they are clicking on the pictures of stairs. At the end they are solving differential equations, answering obscure trivia questions about bacteria, and guessing pantone codes for color swatches.
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Kind of funny, since CBC Marketplace [www.cbc.ca] is supposed to shortly do a piece featuring Kitboga and Jim Browning and how they hack the scammers. It's not out yet, but "soon".
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So... Pretty much the normal captcha experience these days.
To all the naysayers (Score:4, Insightful)
See, there is a good use for AI. Wasting scammers time is worth all the money put into AI.
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I love this concept. I've tried in the past to do this myself and make it a game instead of being annoyed. I really wanted to be able to pretend to be somebody important whose annoyance might result in legislative and enforcement action against these scammers. These days I get very few calls, mostly just political parties before elections and British Gas trying to convince me I need a smart meter (I don't). The car crash scammers must have got wise to me after I strung them along enough to be handed-off
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They are probably trialling it for their customer retentions department. Virgin are notorious for being difficult to leave. They will try everything, including just hanging up on you.
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Until you realize that scammers can use exactly the same technique, by training an AI to run scams. Scammer AIs are much more scalable than human scammers, so expect a vast increase in scam calls in the near future.
Good-until the scammers use AI bots to call victim (Score:3)
Re:Good-until the scammers use AI bots to call vic (Score:4, Insightful)
What is the outcome when we have AI bots calling up people to scam them and then they end up speaking to AI bots designed to waste their time, will the scammers hit back with AI bots designed to pre-screen or detect AI scam bot timewasters. Where doe sit end. Will this recursion provide a new means of perpetual energy?
I suppose that could happen, but we're safe for now because that kind of AI requires expensive support.
This is an arms race. Both sides will improve their methods, but my hope is that the crooks will always be behind.
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The bot incest orgy is only going to get bigger. Bots attending meetings presented by bots to summarize bot activity and recommend more bottery. All used as more bot training data, to grill in that juicy mad-bot-disease flavor.
I bemoaned the True September brought on by myspace/ez-bake phone OSs, but this next era is going to make the dead internet theory look like a fond wish.
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Comcast Support? (Score:2)
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The fact that you can't tell is somewhat impressive, if you think about it.
Impressive ... (Score:1)
... that a company would train its phone-answering-humans to follow a script like a computer would???
\o/ (Score:1)
How is this new? Anyone who's used customer service for the past decade knows Daisy well.
Re: \o/ (Score:2)
Old Daisies would waste at least 15 minutes of the scammer's time by talking about the weather and the awful kids of today.
ROBO calls (Score:2)
I always considered it a service to my fellow humans to waste the ROBO callers time. How much depends on my mood and creativity.
It is interesting that some AI calls hang up when you ask the to say "I am not a robot". Some are better at programming their system than others.
Remember Re:scam? Same thing, better AI (Score:2)
As reported by the same agency (PC Mag) in 2017: Re:scam Bot Has One Goal: Waste the Time of Email Scammers [pcmag.com]: "Send your spam emails to Re:scam, which will engage with and waste the time of scammers trying to dupe you." Their Youtube promo [youtu.be] was pretty good, too.
An even older version of this (sorry, I don't have a link, saw it at an anti-spam conference ~15y ago) involved setting up rudimentary text-to-speech systems on a university lab's phone line. The AI was extremely basic (scripts rather than what we ca
I absolutely love it - can we (Score:2)
...get youtube videos of the results?
I can't wait to have a show where we hear these fraudsters get scammed and more frustrated by the minute.
Pierogi and Scammers Payback just got some friendly competition.
Go all the way! Automate entrapment end-to-end! (Score:2)
In addition to time-wasting, the creator should extend his idea to a automated entrapment scheme. Create a honeypot VM. Setup online banking with a few dollars. Setup collaborations with the bank and local and international law-enforcement. Arrange for the bank and its correspondent banks to trace money transfers, surveil accounts money ultimately flows to, and (crucially) delay specific payments so law-enforcement has enough time to take action.
Waste the scammers time - get them to sink time and effort in
Customer service agents (Score:2)
In the US, Jolly Roger Telephone has been offering (Score:2)
https://jollyrogertelephone.co... [jollyrogertelephone.com] has been providing this service in the US for years - works with most any provider that offers call forwarding, with special support for Google Voice. It didn't start out using AI but it does now. Some of the recordings are quite amusing.
Now we know ... (Score:2)
The AI system, named Daisy, uses voice synthesis to mimic an elderly woman and engages fraudsters in lengthy discussions about fictitious family members