You can give me your bank number.

I don't mean any harm.

Oh bless you dear.

I do appreciate your kind words, but I really like feel it's best to keep that information private.

I'm on a call with Daisy, a lovable elderly lady with a passion for knitting, and I'm admittedly with little success trying to scam her.

Do you have a bank card to hand?

Can you tell me your bank number?

But Daisy isn't really an old lady.

Oh my dear, I must like to say I'm a bit hesitant to share my bank details just like that.

It's okay, I'm friendly.

To keep those things safe.

And obviously I'm not a very good scammer either.

Oh I appreciate that dear.

You sound so lovely, but you know I've always been taught to be careful with my information.

Daisy is actually an AI bot being used by British telecoms company Virgin Media 02 to clamp down hard on scammers targeting elderly people.

She comes well equipped with an intricate backstory and a realistic voice too.

I'm your worst nightmare.

I'm an AI created by 02 to waste phone scammers time.

Promoted using this AI generated advert of Daisy, who is mostly an audio bot, Virgin Media 02's campaign addresses a much wider issue.

Chat.

It's nearly been an hour.

Charity Age UK estimates a fifth of all over 50s in the country fear answering their phones because of fraud.

Able to hold calls autonomously and not requiring any input from her creators, Daisy combines various generative AI models to hold human-like conversations with her menacing callers.

And let's face it dear, I've got all the time in the world.

The reason why we used AI is because it doesn't sleep.

It doesn't eat.

You can use it 24 hours a day.

And it's a great use case to really demonstrate some of these tactics that the scammers do to keep them on the line.

And the great thing about AI is that when it's talking to AI, it's not talking to real people and scamming them out of their hard-earned money.

Oh, bless your heart.

So what's it like actually talking to Daisy and how convincing is she?

Oh, I'm sorry to hear about Norman.

Do you have anyone there with you?

In my conversation, I noticed some very noticeable delays and the occasional blunder of sentences.

And overall, our exchange is excruciatingly long.

Oh, yes, dear.

I absolutely love bird watching.

Then again, that's probably not such a bad thing.

According to her creators, this AI bot really does work.

Virgin Media O2 have posted Daisy's phone number across various online forums known to be used by scammers and say since then, it's taken over 1,000 calls and kept some people on the phone for over 40 minutes.

With new characters and storylines in the works, the hope is to continue to turn the table on the scammers.

We think that there's loads of legs in the old girl yet.

We've got lots of plans.

I mean, we've written all of these different scenarios for her to focus on things like the different types of birds that land in her garden, which or the fact that she plays for the Malmesbury players and she's going to be in the Pirates of Penzance and stuff like that.

So there's just a whole wealth of kind of opportunity there.

And then beyond Daisy, I mean, we have other characters from other backgrounds all standing by in the wings waiting to do the good work.