Tech that wastes scammers’ time is not a new idea, DDB Group New Zealand and Netsafe launched the scammer time-wasting bot, Re:Scam, in 2017, winning a D&AD Pencil, but VCCP’s AI creative agency, faith, and O2 have absolutely perfected it. Because now there’s AI, and the partners have created an older AI woman called Daisy, with a wicked personality – and in her own words, “all the time in the world” to waste scammers’ time.
As an elderly woman, she is scammers’ favourite prey. So Daisy is the perfect scambaiter. Using stereotypical “old lady” frailities, she drives scammers to distraction, telling meandering stories of her family, talking at length about her passion for knitting and providing false personal information including made-up bank details. She is able to interact in real-time ensuring no suspicions are raised on the other end of the line, and works 24/7.
While Daisy keeps scammers occupied, they can’t scam anyone else. And she is part of an awareness campaign that exposes fraudsters’ tricks and tactics and offers top tips on how to avoid scammers.
O2 and faith worked with leading UK scambaiter, Jim Browning, to ensure Daisy was armed with the best information and tactics that kept some phone scammers on the line for more than forty minutes – having followed Jim’s expert advice on how to attract dodgy calls. Daisy herself was created by combining a selection of generative models, an LLM was trained to inform her personality and knowledge-base, and her voice was modelled on a VCCP staff member’s grandmother to ensure total believability. She was brought to life visually by custom-training a diffusion model, creating a photo-real character for the campaign, along with a cutting-edge image-to-video model to make her move.
Simon Valcarcel, marketing director at Virgin Media O2, stated, “At O2, we’ve been investing heavily in the fightback against fraud and this campaign demonstrates the lengths we’re willing to go to keep our customers safe. I’m thrilled to launch the newest member of our fraud team, Daisy: She’s our secret weapon against scammers – indistinguishable from a real person, an AI hiding in plain sight, dedicated to wasting fraudsters time.”
“Yet she also shows no matter how persuasive callers seem, they aren’t always who you think they are – so we all must remain vigilant. With scammers operating full-time call centres specifically to target Brits, we’re urging everyone to leave the scambaiting to the professionals and instead help play their part by forwarding-on dodgy calls and messages to 7726 for free.”
Daisy was created in response to new research from O2 revealing 7 in 10 (71%) of Brits would like to get their own back against scammers that have tried to trick them or their loved ones*. However, wasting their own time ranked the top reason why they wouldn’t bait scammers themselves in future (53%)*.
For the PR-first campaign, a two-minute hero film was created showing Daisy in action with two, shorter, 30-second cut downs created to run on meta and TikTok. O2 is also working with Former Love Islander and scam victim, Amy Hart, to expose fraudsters’ crooked tactics and help O2 customers swerve the scammers. Amy was herself scammed and her involvement aims to help the brand connect to the Gen-Z audience who often think themselves too tech-savvy to fall for phone scams.
O2 blocks millions of fraudulent texts and calls from reaching customers’ phones every month and is releasing new AI-powered spam-fighting tools and enhanced caller identification services for free to all mobile customers to help protect them. To help make life easier for customers, O2 has launched a new webpage offering tips, tricks, and advice so they know what to look out for.
Credits
Client: O2
Creative Agency: faith (part of VCCP)
Creative Directors (Faith): Ben Hopkins & Morten Legarth
Deputy Executive Creative Director (VCCP): David Masterman
Senior Creatives: James Lucking-Pham & Filipe Birck
Senior Account Director: Jonathan Andrews
Business Director: Helena Chaplin
Senior Account Manager: Jamie Glazer
Planning Director: Lotte Jones
Junior Planner: Liberty Covill
Faith CEO: Michael Sugden
Faith CSO: Michael Lee
Faith Managing Partner & Head of Social & Innovation: Alex Dalman
Integrated Creative Producer: Pip Seymour-Judd
Executive Producer: Charlotte Borrell
Producers: Richard Guy & Hannah Chitty
Post Producer: Finlay Macaulay
Technical Director: Phil Beaman
Prompt & Diffusion Model Engineer: Gabriele Lanzafame
Project Director: Ravi Patel
Managing Partner: Kerry Howell
Legal Counsel: Lois Child
Group General Counsel: Rebecca Coleman
Production: Girl&Bear & Artlab
Artlab Manager: James Perry
Resource Manager: Yasmine Moridi
Design Director: Tom Loach
Senior Designers: Matt Montgomery-Taylor & Leila Amin
