Criminals tried to scam a mother using an artificial intelligence-generated voice identical to that of her 15-year-old daughter.
A terrifying phone scam. In Arizona, criminals managed to clone the voice of a teenager using artificial intelligence (AI) to trick her mother into thinking she had been abducted. As Jennifer DeStefano told NBC, she received a call from an unknown phone number while her daughter was on the ski slopes. Fearing a potential accident, she picked up and heard the voice of her daughter who was crying, then the voice of a man.
” Listen to me carefully. I have your daughter. Here’s how it’s going to be. If you call the police or anyone, I’ll drug her. I’m going to do what I want and take him to Mexico”he explained to her, with the false voice of his daughter behind who was screaming “Help me mom. Please help me. Help me “. The man on the phone then demanded a ransom of $1 million and then $50,000 when she told him she didn’t have such a sum.
Fraudulent calls daily
The mother quickly learned that her daughter had not been abducted. During this call, she was in her other daughter’s studio with other mothers. One of them called 911 – the emergency number in the United States – while another called her husband. Within four minutes, they confirmed that her daughter was safe. The mother was still shocked by the resemblance of the fake voice to that of her daughter: “It was completely his voice. It was his intonation. It was the way she would have cried”she told the American media.
According to Dan Mayo, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI office in Phoenix, fraudulent calls regarding a family emergency or a fake AI kidnapping “occur daily”, but not everyone reports them. If before it was necessary to take a large number of samples of a person’s voice to clone it, today it only takes three seconds of the voice in question to achieve this. This, thanks to tools like Microsoft’s VALL-E which is able to imitate any voice by hearing only a sentence.
