Phone scams have reached a terrifying new level thanks to artificial intelligence.
A mother from Arizona claims that scammers cloned her daughter’s voice using AI to extort a $1 million ransom from her as part of a horrifying new voice scheme.
According to Jennifer DeStefano, she nearly hung up when she received a call from an unknown number. But she quickly picked up because she was concerned it might be an emergency since her 15-year-old daughter Briana was on a skiing trip.
“It’s my daughter’s voice crying and sobbing, um, saying, ‘mom,'” Jennifer said. “And I’m like, ‘okay, what happened?’ She’s like, ‘Mom, these bad men have me help me, help me.'”
During the phone call, Jennifer said the man requested a ransom in exchange for her daughter, but he didn’t want a wire exchange; he wanted to pick her up.
“I started to wonder, like, if these people were, like, asking to track my mom and, like, pick her up,” Briana said. “Like, they could have obviously been, like, putting some information together to try and track me or some of my siblings to actually make this a reality. Um, so it definitely scared me.”
Shortly after, Jennifer was able to confirm her daughter’s safety.
According to Jennifer, it was all a plot to imitate her daughter’s voice using artificial intelligence.
“Most people in the modern age have some form of an online identity and have probably spoken in some way in some aspect that’s been recorded, especially if you’re under the age of 25,” futurist and WAYE founder Sinead Bovell said. “So this becomes very, very challenging as we move into a future where we do have these AI generators or synthetic audio when it comes to verification and validation.”
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