How an artificially intelligent voice system counters telephone fraudsters
While the various possibilities of digital crime have already been reported in an earlier article, we will once again focus on one of them in particular: the Social Engineering (social engineering). There, fraudsters gain the trust of their victims and thereby gain access to sensitive data or amounts of money. A well-known method that has also been covered in the media is the so-called Single trick. This involves the criminals contacting older people by telephone and pretending to be their grandchildren or other relatives and having significant amounts of money transferred to their account under the pretense of an acute emergency.
It is difficult to defend against this, especially because this scam is aimed at older people who have less experience and knowledge of the dangers. Even if this is not a purely age-related problem and also younger people are victims of telephone fraud Older people in particular are often targeted. A circumstance that the company O2 in Great Britain is taking advantage of to propose a solution: the AI Grandma Daisy! This is an LLM (large language model: “large language model”), which can make phone calls like a human and sounds like an older lady. It also makes no secret of its artificiality and uses the word AI (artificial intelligence: artificial intelligence) with a wink and self-confidence in the name. Your task is to accept calls from scam numbers reported to O2 instead of the participants who were actually contacted and to keep the fraudsters on the line for as long as possible so that they cannot cause any damage elsewhere. The topics Daisy addresses are similar to those you might know from your own grandmother: knitting, family and the house cat. And she never gets tired of talking about it. Because as she says herself: She has all the time in the world. A fraudster is said to have kept her on the line for over an hour, which she – according to the comment – calmly answered “How time flies” commented.
It is not yet known whether this pilot project will also find its way to Germany – but it is known that it is a very creative countermeasure Social Engineering represents. It also impressively shows what previously under-explored possibilities AI has to offer and in what unexpected ways it can support us in everyday life or make it safer for us. Your ability to read, write, listen and speak shifts the question of what to what for. What is certain is that she will find her way into many other areas and will be able to provide advice and support there – it will be exciting to see where she will unexpectedly develop her potential next time.
Back