New Scam Alert: Artificial Intelligence Cloning Voices to Trick Victims in the Netherlands

Marion still can’t believe what happened to her. She is shaking again, she tells RTL Nieuws, when she thinks back to that call last Thursday in which she was scammed with a cloned voice of her son.

‘Ridiculous’

This new way of scamming has recently been introduced in the Netherlands, the police informed RTL News today. The voice of a friend or family member is cloned by artificial intelligence. That this is now happening in the Netherlands is ‘too crazy for words’, says a police spokesperson. According to him, we must therefore ‘develop a healthy mistrust of everything that comes to us digitally’.

And that is precisely why Marion is now sharing her story. She first wants to explain why she answered the house phone that Ascension Day. It was called from an anonymous number, and normally she would let such a call go. “But my husband had died a week and a half earlier, on April 27. His oxygen device was still here, so I thought: maybe it’s the company that wants to pick up the oxygen device.”

“She’s dead, she’s dead!”

So she picked up. ‘She’s dead, she’s dead mom!’ is the first thing Marion heard. It was her son on the other end of the line, she heard right away. “He cried, was completely panicked. He told him that ‘she’ was dead. ‘Help me mom!’, he shouted.

How it is possible that the voice of Marion’s son was cloned can be seen in the video below.

Marion immediately thought of her grandchild: her son sometimes took his child on the motorcycle. “Who’s dead?!” Marion asked repeatedly. Then someone took over the phone: “A German police officer from Gronau introduced himself, my son’s screaming and crying could be heard in the background during the entire conversation. The officer told me to calm down. He asked if I was his mother and the agent was able to name my home address.”

‘Otherwise he would be arrested’

“Then he said that my son would have had a motorcycle accident in which a young mother had died. The family of that person would not file a report if my son paid the funeral costs. If he did not, he would be arrested for at least three months pending investigation.”

Of course Marion thought this sounded crazy: why no report? What had happened? But Marion was so shocked by the call, her heartbeat was soaring and she didn’t know what she was experiencing.

“You listen to such a cop”

“I tried to call my daughter with my mobile phone. The ‘agent’ heard that and told me that I was absolutely not allowed to call anyone. It would jeopardize the investigation. I had to give some information first. You then listen to such an agent , you do what he says. I still thought: how the hell do I get that money, I work in home care and don’t have much. But I had already figured out that we would solve this with the family. “

The officer wrote down Marion’s phone number and said she would be called back by the public prosecutor shortly. It would then ask for more information.

At that moment something happened, which the scammers did not expect: Marion’s son, who should be crying in a motorcycle accident, walked into her living room.

‘Connection was immediately interrupted’

“I didn’t understand it at all, didn’t know what I was seeing. My son asked: what’s going on here, dude? Of course he saw the panic in my eyes. I told the scammers that my son had come in, and the connection was immediately broken.”

If Marion’s son had come an hour later, Marion would have lost a lot of money. She is sure of that, she says. “I would have waited for that call from the public prosecutor. I would not have called anyone in between, that was not allowed. Then I would pay the funeral costs afterwards, to save my son.”

‘You really hear your own child’

“People might think they would hang up, or never fall for this. But I’m not stupid, I don’t normally fall for scams. But this new trick is your own child, believe me: it really sounded like him . And they knew my home address, knew that my son drove a motorcycle. Then you do other things.”

Marion wants the whole of the Netherlands to read and pass on this story to warn others. “You hope that the police catch these guys, but that seems very difficult to me. That’s why I especially hope that no one falls for it. Because this is really going too far.”

According to the police, you should pay attention to this

Sound can be manipulated, and that is now also being done in the Netherlands by scammers. “If you have a clip of someone speaking – it doesn’t have to be long – then this can already be used to clone that voice,” explains a police spokesperson. “The quality doesn’t even have to be good. Our brain automatically assumes it’s the person you think you hear.”

That is why you should always bear in mind, the police explains, that everything that comes to us digitally can be manipulated. “We have to develop a healthy distrust of this. So always ask yourself with such a call: is it really the person you think it is? And if you have to perform an action by, for example, leaving data or transferring money, – and especially in combination with an emotion such as a crying family member – take a step back, for example, hang up and call the person back on the number you know for that person, or ask something only he or she can know And don’t ask for the date of birth, but something really unique, such as what he or she ate yesterday.”