Ben Hopkins, Morten Legarth
Fighting Fraud with an AI Grandma - Ben Hopkins and Morten Legarth from faith @ VCCP
#1about 4 minutes
Embracing generative AI with an optimistic outlook
Faith @ VCCP was created to proactively explore generative AI as an accelerator for human creativity rather than succumbing to industry fear.
#2about 2 minutes
Creating an AI grandma to fight phone scammers
The project Daisy was inspired by scam baiting YouTubers to create an AI that could engage thousands of scammers simultaneously, preventing them from targeting real people.
#3about 1 minute
Shifting from scam awareness to direct disruption
Traditional educational campaigns about scams lack cut-through, prompting a shift to proactive "story doing" to disrupt scammers directly.
#4about 3 minutes
Blending technical development with creative world building
The bot was developed in-house by a team that combined technical skills for the workflow with creative direction for world-building and character design.
#5about 4 minutes
Choosing a grandma persona for creative and technical reasons
A grandma persona was chosen to create a compelling story by flipping stereotypes and to technically mask AI response latency as natural pauses.
#6about 2 minutes
Navigating GDPR and the ethics of scam baiting
The team consulted with legal experts to navigate GDPR and the ethical rights of scammers, ultimately proceeding due to the criminal nature of the activity.
#7about 2 minutes
Designing a believable persona beyond generic AI
To make the character believable, the team used detailed world-building prompts and iterative training, even incorporating emergent traits like a pet cat named Fluffy.
#8about 7 minutes
Cloning a voice from natural conversational data
Instead of using generic voice libraries trained on narration, the team cloned a real grandmother's voice from hours of natural conversation to achieve a believable tonality.
#9about 3 minutes
The successful first live test with a real scammer
The first live test was a major success, with the AI keeping a scammer engaged for 15 minutes by seamlessly pivoting the conversation to a bird in her garden.
#10about 4 minutes
Considering the energy consumption of a voice-based AI
The project's energy consumption was deemed relatively low as it is voice-based and primarily involves fine-tuning models on consumer-grade hardware, not large-scale pre-training.
#11about 3 minutes
Measuring success through awareness and disruption
The project's success was measured by its ability to waste thousands of scammers' time and by driving a 44% increase in the use of the 7726 scam reporting service.
#12about 4 minutes
Future applications and positive public reception
Future plans involve using the AI to gather intelligence on scammer tactics, building on the project's positive reception from both the public and security professionals.
Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
Featured Partners
Related Videos
AI: Superhero or Supervillain? How and Why with Scott Hanselman
Scott Hanselman
Creating AI Books for Children and Navigating EU Regulations - Coffee with Developers - Matthias and Dima from Oscar Stories
Exploring AI: Opportunities and Risks in Development
Angie Jones, Kent C Dobbs, Liran Tal, Chris Heilmann
Panel discussion: Developing in an AI world - are we all demoted to reviewers? WeAreDevelopers WebDev & AI Day March2025
Laurie Voss, Rey Bango, Hannah Foxwell, Rizel Scarlett, Thomas Steiner
AI and Accessibility: The Good and the Bad - Fireside Chat
Léonie Watson, Artur Ortega, Karl Groves, Geri Reid & Sara Joy
OpenAI for FinTech: Building a Stock Market Advisor Chatbot
Akmal Chaudhri
Bringing the power of AI to your application.
Krzysztof Cieślak
WeAreDevelopers LIVE - Build a multi AI agents game master with Strands & our weekly web finds
Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney & Tiffany Souterre
From learning to earning
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
Founding Software Engineer (£100k-£140k + Equity) at Well-funded AI voice agent startup
Jack & Jill\u002FExternal ATS
Charing Cross, United Kingdom
€100-140K
Senior
React
Python
TypeScript
Fast track to star developer - bootcamp for AI enthusiasts
Vicoland
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Intermediate
PHP
API
Node.js
Angular
Amazon Web Services (AWS)




