Today’s awesome thing was found on the Tacky Raccoons blog, via Nag on the Lake.

British mobile phone company Virgin Media O2 has created the best response to phone scammers I think I’ve ever heard. They used AI to create a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot whose mission is to waste people’s time, but she doesn’t bother just anyone. The seemingly helpless and innocuous “granny” Daisy has been tricking phone scammers into thinking they’re speaking to a real person.

Daisy’s job, per O2, is to talk with fraudsters and waste as much of their time as possible. Apparently, she’s managed to keep unwitting scammers on the phone for an average of 40 minutes at a time. The company has put out scads of phone numbers on the dark web and on illegal phone lists indicating the numbers belong to an elderly woman who lives alone. Designed to raise awareness of the fraud epidemic in the UK, Daisy is busily irritating phone scam predators 24 hours a day.

“Whilst anyone can be a victim of a scam, criminal fraud gangs often target the elderly so we leaned into scammers’ own biases to create an AI granny based on a real relative of a VCCP employee. Over the course of many hours of scam calls she’s told meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting and provided false personal information including made-up bank details.”

Good for you, Daisy!