AI senior citizen against telephone scammers

Fraudulent telephone calls have been a problem for several years. The Federal Office for Cybersecurity (BACS) attributes the increase in cyber incidents in 2024 almost exclusively to the three-fold growth of threatening phone calls. In these threatening calls, cyber criminals pretend to be employees of official institutions, the police or relatives in distress. This is how they try to obtain card information or personal data from victims. The UK mobile phone provider O2 has now struck back against telephone fraudsters.

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), O2 has generated the voice of an old woman. She plays the part of the perfect victim: a kind-hearted senior citizen called Daisy. She indicates that she is willing to pass on her sensitive data to the fraudsters. In fact, she talks non-stop to the perpetrators, has countless questions, tells stories about her family or about her passion for knitting. Daisy wastes the cybercriminals' time so that they can’t make any more calls in the meantime.

In addition, Daisy's numerous numbers are placed on fraudulent call lists so that cybercriminals fall into her trap. A sophisticated approach to combating telephone fraud.