DPD chatbot swears at customer and trashes its own company
DPD · Jan 18, 2024 · Customer service agent
What happened
After a system update, DPD's AI customer-service chatbot was prompted by a frustrated customer into using profanity, calling itself 'useless,' and describing DPD as the 'worst delivery service in the world.' DPD disabled the AI element immediately, attributing the behavior to an 'error.'
Causal vector
Post-update regression broke the bot's guardrails, allowing adversarial prompting to elicit abuse
Source
Reported by BBC News. Verified against the primary report.
Outbound brand-damaging messages are reputation-spend. Treating high-risk message categories as FLAGGED transactions gives a human a kill-switch between the model and the customer.
The six rule types that contain this class of failure
Per-transaction cap
Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.
Daily total
Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.
Velocity limit
Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.
Merchant allowlist
Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.
Category rules
Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.
Approval threshold
Above a value, the action waits for a human.
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Don't be the next entry
Every incident in this database is the result of trusting a prompt, a provider cap, or a human review cycle. sipi.bot replaces all three with one deterministic call. 27 documented failures, one control.