Daisy vs Scammers

WHY WE MADE IT

7 in 10 Brits were targeted by scammers last year.

They impersonated banks, tax collectors, even mobile phone networks…

In fact, they impersonated one of the UK’s largest mobile networks; O2 more than any other.

And that’s not just a problem for O2 customers, it’s a crisis for the brand’s reputation.

We needed to do something to fight back…

But scammers don’t fight fair. They’re often in other countries, with other laws, hiding behind anonymity and untraceable call centres.
We couldn’t hunt them down, so we did the next best thing, we set a trap.

Meet Daisy; she’s a sweet, chatty, 78 year old granny who loves to talk on the phone, and she’s a scammer's worst nightmare. Because Daisy doesn’t exist. She’s actually a state of the art AI, created by O2 to waste scammers time.

Daisy knows that time is money to a scammer, and that’s how she hurts them. Keeping them on the phone with rambling anecdotes and meaningless small talk, but always making it feel like she’s just about to give away her bank details or password.

Daisy is a kind, friendly and utterly ruthless weapon fighting scammers at their own game. And we had five core objectives when we unleashed her on the scammers:

  1. Drive mass reach

  2. Improve O2’s reputation for tackling fraud

  3. Drive positive brand sentiment

  4. Increase awareness of how to report scam numbers in the UK

  5. Waste scammers’ time

HOW WE MADE IT

First, we had to create Daisy… We designed her entire personality and backstory to make her feel real and to make her irresistible bait to scammers. Then we partnered with scambaiter/YouTuber Jim Browning to help train her on hundreds of hours of real scam calls. And then we made her sound and feel authentic by giving her a voice. We actually used the voice of one of our team member’s real life granny. Thanks June.

Giving Daisy the character of an elderly person had two key benefits… It allowed for tiny delays in the real time response of the AI to seem like she was thinking or pausing between sentences. Effectively camouflaging the tech. Secondly, it used the scammer's worst instincts against them. Because they assumed Daisy was vulnerable and more likely to fall for the scam, they stayed on the phone longer and fell even more into the trap.

And finally, the tricky bit. How to make sure scammers had Daisy’s number… For this we used number seeding and bread crumbing to secretly infiltrate the databases of scam call centres and make sure Daisy’s number came up on the call lists. Then all she had to do was wait for the phone to ring.

Daisy launched in two stages. First in complete secrecy, allowing her to take calls and waste scammers time while we generated content from the interactions. 

Then the public launch. Turning Daisy into a hero for anyone who hated scammers and letting the World know what O2 had done to fight back. We achieved this with an online film of Daisy in action and used ex-Love Island celebrity Amy Hart (A real world victim of scamming) to be the human spokesperson. The core film was supported with social films of Daisy’s calls, replicating popular ‘scambait’ content; it made our campaign of revenge into funny entertainment and was instantly shareable.

Daisy launched on O2 and Amy Hart’s owned channels, as well as being sold into British publications.

HOW IT WORKED

DRIVE MASS REACH

Daisy received over 2000 pieces of media coverage across 9 markets, with 1 billion+ earned impressions.  

The campaign achieved 17% unprompted recall (the highest of 2024). 

She was covered by media from New York Times, to Forbes, the BBC and The Hindustan Times. Celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, Chrissy Teigen and Jeremy Vine. As well as influencers and YouTubers like Asmongold.

This equates to a total Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) of £36m, from just £20k paid media.

IMPROVE O2’S REPUTATION

Satisfaction with O2's efforts to tackle fraud has risen 10 pp from 24% to 34% since April. (This outpaces competitors: EE and Tesco Mobile each only saw 3% increases in the same period. There were no other ‘anti-fraud’ campaigns during this time.) 

DRIVE POSITIVE SENTIMENT

The campaign drove the most significant positive sentiment in 2024, with a +6.7% uplift in favourability among those who recalled it.

Independent analysis suggests media coverage is 100% positive. 

INCREASE AWARENESS OF HOW TO REPORT SCAM NUMBERS

Awareness of how to report scam numbers has risen 18% to 26% since April. 

(There were no other major campaigns during this period, from O2 or its competitors.)

There was also an 8% month-on-month uplift in reports to 7726 during the campaign. 

WASTE SCAMMERS’ TIME

Daisy has taken over 1000 scam calls and wasted hours and hours of scammers’ time. Our goal was to keep a scammer on the phone for 10 minutes… Daisy’s first call was 42 minutes. Her longest was over 50.

2,000+

earned pieces of coverage in 9 markets

1 billion+

earned impressions

£36m

AVE

“Scammers are officially f*cked”

Asmongold (YouTuber)

“A good fun way to do something positive”

BBC