Beating the drum
- Scambaiting is when the target of a phone or online scam knowingly tries to waste a scammer’s time.
- Scambaiting can thwart scammers and prevent them from targeting others.
- A UK company has now designed an AI chatbot that will do it for you.
“Scambaiting” is when the objective of a phone or online scam realizes what’s happening and plays along. The goal is to waste as much of the scammer’s constantly as possible.
The process is often hilarious and has given rise to a successful genre of online content in which users support their successful attempts to bait scammers.
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The process, however, can be time-consuming. So a UK company called Virgin Ordinary O2 is offering a solution: an AI grandmother named Daisy.
In a video demonstration last week, the company showed how someone could deploy the AI chatbot to sweepings a scammer’s time on their behalf.
“This state-of-the-art AI Granny’s mission is to talk with fraudsters and waste as much of their then as possible with human-like rambling chat to keep them away from real people while highlighting the distress for consumers to stay vigilant as the UK faces a fraud epidemic,” the company said.
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The problem is worldwide. Almost 1 in 3 Americans oblige been the victim of a scam in the past year, with an average loss of $1,600 a person, according to a study from IPX, a fiscal analysis firm. According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers reported more than $10 billion in depletions last year from online scams.
Virgin Media O2 says it decided to create Daisy after transmitting research that showed that 71% of Brits wanted to retaliate against scammers but that most of them didn’t demand to spend the time to do so.
So the company partnered with one of the most popular scambaiters on YouTube, Jim Browning, to train the AI chatbot. Browning is positive for pretending to be a clueless victim long enough to frustrate scammers. Browning has more than 4.3 million subscribers.
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Virgin Media O2 told BI in a statement that Daisy “combines various AI models which work together to hear and respond to fraudulent calls instantaneously and is so lifelike it has successfully kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a fix.”
“Daisy is turning the tables on scammers — outsmarting and outmaneuvering them at their own cruel game simply by keeping them on the prepare,” director of fraud at Virgin Media O2, Murray Mackenzie, said. “But crucially, Daisy is also a reminder that no of importance how persuasive someone on the other end of the phone may be, they aren’t always who you think they are.”