O2's AI granny Daisy wastes scammers' time — Eurobest 2025 Digital Craft Grand Prix

O2's research found that 71% of Brits would like to get their own back against scammers, but 53% said they wouldn't bait them because it would waste their own time. One in five Brits faces a fraud attempt every week. So the mobile operator built the one thing fraudsters hate most: a granny with all the time in the world.

Daisy, unveiled in November 2024, is a working conversational AI that answers calls from fraudsters in real time. Speech recognition transcribes the caller, a custom LLM with a 'personality' layer decides the reply, and text-to-speech speaks it back instantly. She was voiced like a real VCCP employee's grandmother, trained with the help of scambaiter Jim Browning, and her number was seeded onto scammer call lists, so the fraudsters ring her themselves.

Daisy stalls callers with family stories, knitting talk, a lost cat and made-up bank details — some calls ran past 40 minutes. Every call was recorded, and the most frustrating conversations became the hero film and social clips. Within months she had taken more than 1,000 scam calls; the campaign earned over 1,800 press pieces, more than a billion earned impressions and a million organic YouTube views.