4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

https://app.oravys.com/blog/mercor-breach-2026

by Oravys • 3 months ago

600 226 3 months ago

app.oravys.com

Oravys5• 3 months ago

Author here. Wrote this after watching Lapsus$ post the Mercor archive on their leak site earlier this month. The thing that struck me is the combination: voice samples paired with ID document scans. Most breaches leak one or the other. This one ships a deepfake-ready kit. Tried to keep the writeup practical: what an attacker can actually do with this combo (banking voiceprint bypass, Arup-style video calls, insurance fraud), and a 5-step checklist for the contractors who were in the dump.

  Happy to discuss the forensic detection side. AudioSeal
  watermarks, AASIST anti-spoofing, and how the detection landscape changes
  once voice biometrics start leaking at scale.

davsti4• 3 months ago

Interesting - thanks for the rabbit hole today. ;)

Mercer hasn't released many public statements over the incident. Social media posts aren't necessarily public; but I did find this breach notification sample filed with CA - https://oag.ca.gov/ecrime/databreach/reports/sb24-621099 . I guess we'll see if our legislators finally take data privacy seriously.

caminante2• 3 months ago

Didn't this happen three weeks ago?

Mercor has definitely released statements with boilerplate "investigations are underway."

noir_lord2• 3 months ago

HSBC offered voice verification years ago and I just laughed and said nope.

I don’t even use biometrics on apple devices, I use a 6 digit pin.

It was always a stupid idea.

The thing about been willing to trade convenience for security is you get called paranoid and then when the other shoe does drop and you are still doing that you still get called paranoid for the current thing you are not doing that “everyone does”.

pavelstoev• 3 months ago

Paraphrasing Franklin and Churchill, those who trade some security for some convenience may soon find themselves possessed of neither at all.

latexr• 3 months ago

I don’t even use biometrics on apple devices

Assuming Apple is truthful on this matter (so far it seems so), Apple devices store a mathematical representation of the data, not the data itself (i.e. not a picture of your finger) and keep it only on device on a special hardware section designed for extra security. When apps ask for authentication, they can never inspect the data, they can only ask “does this match?”.

Even if you were somehow able to exfiltrate the data and find some way to transform it for something nefarious, you’d still need to first attack and bypass a specific hardware feature of the target’s device.

So sure, not having any representation of the data anywhere is technically more secure (maybe, as typing your code could be intercepted by a shoulder surfer or a camera), but biometrics on Apple devices are fundamentally not the same as having your raw data available on a random server somewhere.

Zetaphor• 3 months ago

Self-audit your public audio footprint. Search YouTube, podcast directories, and old Zoom recording

This is suggestion #1 on your list of remediation steps for victims, but you didn't provide any information on how anyone would actually do that. How exactly would I search the internet for copies of my voice?

Please don't tell me the solution is giving an embedding of my voice to another third party.

Oravys5• 3 months ago

Great question. There's no "reverse voice search" yet the way there is for images — that's genuinely a tool the world needs. In the meantime, the most useful thing is searching your name across YouTube and podcast platforms to map out what's already public. And for Mercor contractors specifically, the California AG breach notice gives you a solid legal basis to request full deletion. Worth doing today.

BiteCode_dev• 3 months ago

One more data point for why sueing companies should lead to CEO getting prison time as well. And ideally invent some kind a of equivalent of pruson for non human persons like organisations.

Because right now the incentive to do what's right are so low. Taking a risk with other's people lives is becomming the norm for companies.

eqvinox3• 3 months ago

The only data that cannot be stolen or leaked is data that doesn't exist. Hard lesson for both users and companies.

Germans (because of course) have a word for this: "Datensparsamkeit". Being frugal with your data.

wlesieutre• 3 months ago

I miss the pre-LLM days when you could make a decent argument that having any unnecessary data was just a liability. Now all anybody thinks is “more data for the AI!”

CincinnatiMan• 3 months ago

Were you not around for the Big Data heyday a decade ago?

citrin_ru• 3 months ago

Data hoarding predates LLMs. There where other machine learning methods which also needed data for training.

hdndjsbbs• 3 months ago

10+ years ago companies were hoovering up data for ML - trying to find correlations in high-dimensionality data. Mostly the results were garbage but occasionally you hit on a real, unexpected phenomenon.

Nowadays you just throw all the data into a black box and believe whatever it says blindly.

hiccuphippo2• 3 months ago

Data that is publicly available also can't be stolen or leaked. Nobody can steal Mozilla's common voice dataset.

littlecranky67• 3 months ago

Data can never be stolen, because it is not a physical thing. Data can be copied, and it can be erased - sometimes both happens at the same time. Data can be lost, that is when its last existing copy was erased.

altruios• 3 months ago

pedantic and true. What was stolen was not data, but future revenue based on exclusive access to that data.

Planktonne• 3 months ago

The use of "steal" for non-physical things pre-dates the use of "data" in the modern sense [1]. Policing language incorrectly is not reasonable.

[0] https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view....

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/data

dnnddidiej2• 3 months ago

Money is not a physical thing.

tgv2• 3 months ago

Germans (because of course)

I don't know if it's the reason you imply. In the 70s, there were big debates in Germany about privacy and data storage. They spoke of one's data shadow (Datenschatten). I suspect this word comes from that tradition. The reason the word exists would then be the reflection (Verwaltigung) on WW2.

mrsvanwinkle• 3 months ago

Love it, also love how Datenschatten can also imply that it disappears when someone shines light on it

theptip• 3 months ago

The Stasi would be the obvious cultural context.

In the US of course the government buys this sort of information legally from corporations.

xenocratus• 3 months ago

I took the "because of course" to be about having a word for everything - a stereotypical idea about the German language.

Centigonal• 3 months ago

Germany resisted Google Street View until 2023, which was something I thought was very impressive.

cyanydeez2• 3 months ago

Yeah, so Germany had a ton of secret police files and of course learned very well what happens when a bunch of people start collecting dossiers.

So yeah, of course they've developed that type of distrust. Americans should have also after the 50-60s paranoia of red scare, black people etc. Instead they just spend a few decades building a anti-social state.

maxweylandt• 3 months ago

Verwaltigung

is not a word -- I think you mean Vergangenheitsbewältigung?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergangenheitsbew%C3%A4ltigung

elevation• 3 months ago

The only data that cannot be stolen or leaked is data that doesn't exist. Hard lesson for both users and companies.

Except no company is learning this lesson.

The enterprise threat model includes "our own users", and the modus operandi is to maintain as much information on that threat as possible.

coolkewlcuil• 3 months ago

The only winning move is not to play.

__alexs• 3 months ago

Seems a bit like blaming the victim? Your voice (like DNA) is kind of ambient data that's hard to hide.

dhosek• 3 months ago

Or you could put it in a box with no connection to the internet.

Introducing… The Hooli Box!

dnnddidiej2• 3 months ago

Do Germans have lots of words or just a lack of spaces?

jacquesm3• 3 months ago

You could have seen this coming a mile away. So far I have gotten away with never uploading my ID and/or interacting with one of those companies (though one idiot working for some VC thought it was ok to sign a document on my behalf by uploading my signature!!, never mind a bit of fraud) but it is getting harder and harder. Banks and in some cases even governments forcing you to send data to these operators is a very bad idea. But hey, who ever got hurt by some security theater?

I've had to open a bank account for a company here a few years ago and that was right on the bubble of this happening and they still had an option to come by in person with the proper documentation, which I did, now it is all outsourced.

These companies are the fattest targets and they're run by incompetents. You should assume that anything you give them will eventually be part of some hack.

Schlagbohrer• 3 months ago

Tell us more about that fraud story! Was the person your attorney or accountant? Or just some "smart" person who decided to wisely save time by doing fraud?

jacquesm3• 3 months ago

It was a fund administrator. I still find it unbelievable that they would so casually do this. And yes, they thought they were very smart... and helpful too...

hiccuphippo2• 3 months ago

Why is the ID a hidden secret that can be used for anything regarding security in the first place?

jacquesm3• 3 months ago

Because historically that's how it worked, but officials just looked at the document and verified that it was the real thing. Then photocopiers came along and it became normalized to take copies of the documents. Then digital copies happened and that changed things completely when coupled with networking technology. What the officials in charge don't seem to understand is that by making digital copies in networked environments the IDs themselves lost their value completely, after all if the digital copy serves any purpose at all as a stand-in for the original then they have become that original.

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

This kind of event is the best argument against needless data hoarding. But it would help if the law better provided for some kind of consequences for negligence.

VladVladikoff• 3 months ago

Man that’s pretty shitty that Mercor tricked 40k contractors, and then did a poor job of securing their data. There should be stronger consequences for stuff like this.

throwa356262• 3 months ago

What happens now is that a lot of clueless CTO that didn't know about this company now know it's name. So the outcome of this mess is probably more business for Mercor

I mean, just look at what happened to Crowdstrike....

yunyu• 3 months ago

Mercor has around 5 customers that make up 95% of its revenue. Anybody who needs to know about them already does.

interludead3• 3 months ago

At minimum, collecting voiceprints should come with much stricter consent, retention and security requirements than ordinary "training data"

Havoc• 3 months ago

I love how the check if your affected involves giving a voice sample to whatever the fuck that website is

2ndorderthought• 3 months ago

It's like those have been owned websites. Where you type in your name email and they grab your IP location and anything else to sell it off.

throw0101c• 3 months ago

"My voice is my passport. Verify Me."

java-man• 3 months ago

HSBC did that. I could never understand that - the exact phrase was in the movie!

NitpickLawyer• 3 months ago

Someone probably did it for an internal demo, as a joke. Then people pushed it upwards, until someone clueless approved it.

deltoidmaximus• 3 months ago

Fidelity seemed to sign you up for this when you called them on the phone almost automatically. Ridiculous since it was defeated easily in a hacker movie from the 1990s using a tape recorder.

amarcheschi• 3 months ago

I've been doing similar things on a different platform because as a uni student the pay is kinda nice, but I limit myself to task without voice/video and just input from mouse/keyboard to do reinforcement learning/data tagging. No way I'm trusting these companies or the companies they contract the work with

embedding-shape• 3 months ago

I wonder how many of the current text-to-speech ML models have large parts of leaked or "stolen" data in their training data? Almost none of the TTS releases seem to talk about exactly where they get their training data from, for some reason. I also wonder if we'll see an explosion in SOTA TTS in ~6 months from now.

hirako2000• 3 months ago

It's already there. And keeps moving.

Even have a nice UI on top.

https://voicebox.sh/

jubilanti• 3 months ago

Not really, Mozilla Common Voice (the ImageNet of speech) is larger than this. Their English database has 3814 hours, 1.6 million sentences, from 100k speakers.

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/languages

nmacias• 3 months ago

GOOG-411 was "competing" with a strong company (1-800-FREE411) by serving no ads in a category worth ~$3.5B at the time. It was inexplicable at the time, but they did this to get voice samples, way back when. For reasons like that, I expect that this category of training is baked — but I don't have current domain knowledge fwiw.

interludead3• 3 months ago

Yep, the silence around provenance is probably the most suspicious part

john_strinlai2• 3 months ago

Set up a verbal codeword with family and finance contacts. Pick a phrase that has never been spoken on a recording and never typed in chat. Brief the people who handle money on your behalf. If a call ever asks for a transfer, the codeword is mandatory.

good luck with this. most finance people deal with hundreds to thousands of clients. they obviously cant remember everyones code word. commonly used finance systems arent setup to securely store these codewords. they dont have processes or policies in place to implement or adhere to any sort of codeword verification.

Rotate where voiceprints are still in use. [...] Do that now, ideally from a new recording in a different acoustic environment than the leaked sample.

would this even have an effect? i have never heard of "rotating" a voice print. isnt the whole point of a voice print that you cant really change it? if simply switching your environment completely changes your voice print, that would make voice prints utterly useless to begin with.

iterateoften• 3 months ago

Yeah seems like nonsense advise. Have a code word that was never recorded? I don’t see how that would tote y anything. Like the point of these systems is they can say stuff you never said convincingly

MarsIronPI• 3 months ago

The idea is that the attacker doesn't know the codeword. If the attacker finds out about the codeword then the attacker could indeed fake it. Hence why you shouldn't say/write it in recordings or chat messages.

wongarsu• 3 months ago

Someone who has hundreds or thousands of clients presumably couldn't remember every client's voice either, so no meaningful security is lost. They are approximately as secure or insecure as before

john_strinlai2• 3 months ago

presumably couldn't remember every client's voice either, so no meaningful security is lost

there are automated systems for this already. my bank, isp, etc. use them when you call in to skip the traditional verification steps. this fact is also highlighted in the article.

the problem is that there isnt typically a system in place for setting up or validating code words, so the advice given is not practical to implement.

tenpointwo• 3 months ago

With most US banks, you can ask them to put in a note on your account file for a code word, it will show up anytime the account file is pulled up. Now, whether or not a customer service agent will know to do so is another question. Maybe as attack vectors like this are utilized more often it will become part of their SOP. Or just stop using voice verification. In my experience, even if you pass voice verification, it only grants you access to the account and check balance and txs but still requires information like PIN or a code sent in the app or phone number. There are attack vectors for these as well but not guaranteed.

The other use cases (like calling payroll, etc) likely don’t have the same protections and probably would be more effective.

barrenko• 3 months ago

It more looks like the purpose of such company was to steal such data.

52-6F-62• 3 months ago

Look at their privacy policies. It absolutely is. They are harvesting video, voice, and much more.

oefrha• 3 months ago

If you were a Mercor contractor and you believe your voice may already be in circulation, ORAVYS will analyze the first three suspect samples free of charge.

Awesome, if you're a victim of an AI company having your voice, you can help yourself by sending another AI company your voice!

Audio is never used to train commercial models without explicit consent

I'm sure Mercor has explicit consent as well, legal teams are reasonably good at legally covering their asses with license terms.

a012• 3 months ago

Reminds me of my experience when trying to remove my Airbnb account, they require my ID card scans of both sides. I said fuck it and never touch this company again

zelphirkalt• 3 months ago

Quickly, extract some more money from this customer and hold their data hostage!

sidewndr46• 3 months ago

This reminds me of those identity theft settlements, where you need to prove your identity to claim the reward

Henchman212• 3 months ago

Has your identity been stolen? Try our free credit monitoring for a month!

Selling the solution to the problem you caused ought to be illegal.

hedora3• 3 months ago

This would eliminate the credit report, monitoring and fixing industry, which would be a good thing.

Court records are public in the US. If creditors want to know if you’ve been in financial trouble, they should check for bankruptcies and lawsuits, not the extrajudicial version of those that the credit reporting companies run based on hearsay.

zkmon2• 3 months ago

Selling the solution to the problem you caused ought to be illegal.

Most tech solutions are built on the problems they created. This includes phones, cars, computers, every software upgrade, and almost every electronic gadget. You are forced to use them because the world around you is no longer compatible with the way of life that was before the introduction of these tech.

caminante2• 3 months ago

Per the WSJ article last week, I suspect Mercor's playing in a grey area of contracts. It wasn't just voice.[0]

A lot of people were basically wiretapping themselves AND their businesses!

While a lot of Mercor "contractors" claim Mercor over-reached with data gathering via Insightful, it's kind of smart because people are too afraid to complain too much knowing they'll not only lose their primary job, but also open themselves up to uncapped liability for willful misconduct.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mercor-ai-startup-personal-data-...

saadn92• 3 months ago

The irony runs deeper than the free analysis offer. The whole Mercor contractor relationship was this exact pattern: hand over studio-quality voice recordings and ID scans to get paid for data labeling work that didn't require either. "Explicit consent" was buried in the terms, and people clicked through because they needed the paycheck.

Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

inetknght• 3 months ago

biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

"My voice is my passport. Verify me."

I have to renew my passport every 10 years or so. How do I do that with my voice? I guess it's time to take some vocal lessons.

echelon• 3 months ago

Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

Voices aren't strong.

There just aren't that many unique characteristic parameters behind a voice - it's largely dictated by an evolutionary shared shared larynx and vocal tract. They aren't fingerprints.

The fact that human voice impersonation is not only widely possible but popular should give you an indication of this. Prosody, intonation, range, etc. - it's all flexible and can be learned and duplicated.

The signals are simple too, because we have to encode and decode them quickly. You may or may not be able to picture and rotate an apple tree in your head, but you can easily read this sentence in the voice of David Attenborough.

Moreover, you can easily fine tune a voice model to fit any other speaker. You can store the unique speaker embeddings in a very thin layer. Zero and few shot unseen sampling can even come close to full reproduction. You can measure this all quantitatively.

Voices are not, and never have been, fingerprints. They're just not that unique.

Marsymars• 3 months ago

Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

The problem is that even if you know that, you still get bombarded by banking apps promising "biometrics are more secure than passwords, switch now!"

senectus1• 3 months ago

I doubt 1% of the 40k will learn anything.

also this took me way too long to realize it had nothing to do with warhammer.

post_below• 3 months ago

This comment is pure LLM.

I feel like we're right on the threshold where we give up and start interacting with slop like it's human written.

tlb• 3 months ago

You can rotate your voice with substantial effort. Just speak differently: higher or lower pitch, a different accent. Your friends may look at you funny for the first few years.

freedomben• 3 months ago

This is an important point with biometrics that most people don't realize. When I say that biometrics aren't good security, most people are perplexed because they have seen movies and such that are high-tech where iris scans or fingerprints are the pinnacle of security.

I like to tell them this story that I read somewhere a decade or so ago. It might not be a true story (I never checked) but it's a helpful way of thinking about it.

Bob landed a great job and decided to celebrate by buying a new luxury car (a BMW in my recollection, but could be wrong) that had a thumbprint authentication for unlocking and for starting it, so you never have to carry external keys. One day a thief decided to steal Bob's car. They broke in to his house and tied him up. When they demanded the keys and he said there weren't any, they decided to cut off his thumb and use it as the key. Now Bob has no thumb and his car still got stolen.

lynndotpy• 3 months ago

I think "CYA" is maybe a misleading or overflowery term.

In the idealized world, the legal system is meant to provide an accessible alternative to violence for reconciling disputes, but it's increasingly wielded as an impossibly kafkaesque system meant to maintain corporate power over individuals.

I think "CYA" is an overly-flowery term for the reality that they're blocking every avenue for legal recourse, while a variety of other avenues still exist for which adding friction requires the maintenance of expensive and ongoing costs (owning multiple residences, hiring security, etc.)

(To be clear, I am advocating for a more accessible and level legal system, not for UHC-style violence.)

cholmdomsky2• 3 months ago

I'm taking some college courses, and one of them explicitly suggests to keep maybe-not-okay communications off of email so that "you don't expose your company to risks of litigation."

Ah, I see. So, when discussing ways to ensure cuatomers cannot utilize our warranty process, I'll make sure to do so in ways that are not traceable and won't show up in discovery.

sophacles• 3 months ago

In the idealized world, the legal system is meant to provide an accessible alternative to violence for reconciling disputes, but it's increasingly wielded as an impossibly kafkaesque system meant to maintain corporate power over individuals.

This is an overly flowery way of saying: violence.

The worst of the consequences are the same. People end up dead, destitute, and/or with long-term health consequences and are unable to enjoy the fruits labor in the worst cases. In the milder cases i think i'd prefer a bruise for a week to a huge financial loss.

cyanydeez2• 3 months ago

This reminds me of all the new companies that want to "help" you get your public information out of $CORPORATE hands; as if these companies will some how not succumb to either enshittification or breach.

The good thing about the grift economy is it grifts itself, like the turtles!

aitchnyu• 3 months ago

I remember an AI dataset tool asking candidates to record a 1 minute self intro video for interview purposes in 2022. I was wondering if they were manually watching all of them.

Oravys5• 3 months ago

Hi oefrha. I totally understand your point of view. The only thing is: we give you an opportunity to recognize how unique your voice actually is. We only analyze the audio file to show you how much uniqueness a voice carries. Audio is never used for training without explicit consent and is purged on a defined retention schedule. That is very important to us and also to let people know what their voice has to offer them for their growth and self awareness. Big difference wiTh what Mercor did.

globalnode• 3 months ago

not to be conspiratorial but stolen? or given away...

ethagnawl3• 3 months ago

So, they should all just rotate their voices ... right?

I jest but the majority of the "normal" people I know are happy to hand over biometrics because _it's easier_. We need to start branding biometrics as "forever passwords" or something to help people understand just what they're handing over when they validate access to their checking account or enter Disney World or whatever else.

MattGaiser3• 3 months ago

One of the problems is that "forever passwords" is a term used positively when I worked in banking, as it was a password that the customer could not forget and would not need support using.

So I could easily see a lot of people viewing this as a positive.

ethagnawl3• 3 months ago

That's a really good point. It lays bare some of my biases when it comes to thinking about and communicating with "normal people" about this sort of thing.

order-matters• 3 months ago

the "it's easier" people operate on a fundamentally different way than you or I. they thrive in the world of plausible deniability and social trust. They almost dont care what happens to them as long as it isnt their fault. And they do not consider putting themselves at risk to be the same as being at fault

in a certain light, it's kind of admirable. they live like the world is the way it should be

Gigachad• 3 months ago

That’s HN users towards politics and the environment. Sitting smugly with their yubikey and encrypted laptop while the world around them crumbles.

ooterness• 3 months ago

Functionally, biometrics are closer to a username than a password.

Fingerprints, DNA, iris scans, gait patterns, etc. are all something you can't change (much like a permanent account ID) and are constantly being presented to the world (much like an email address). In addition under US law, police can compel presentation of fingerprints, but passwords are protected under the 5th amendment.

ethagnawl3• 3 months ago

That's fair. Though, thinking about it this way, I'd argue they're even more like a permanent API key. Again, messaging completely lost on people who don't spend time worrying these things.

eolgun• 3 months ago

The biometric pairing is what makes this particularly bad. A leaked password is recoverable. A leaked voiceprint combined with ID scans is permanent, you can not rotate your voice.

The deeper problem is that most of these companies collected this data because they could, not because they needed it for the core service. 'Datensparsamkeit' is the right frame: the voice samples were a liability sitting on a server waiting for exactly this.

immanuwell• 3 months ago

they literally handed over their voice, their face, and their government id to train ai models for peanuts - and now lapsus is sitting on 4tb of 'you' that you can never change like a password

kristopherleads• 3 months ago

I'm at the point where I might start professionally using a voice changer. I mean what in the world, my guy?

sharadov• 3 months ago

Mercor is the most scummy company out there, run by a bunch of sleazeball 20 somethings who are getting a lot of press as the youngest billionaires in the making.

Can't wait for them to crash and burn.

MandieD• 3 months ago

30 under 30 doing 10 to 20 candidates right there.

TrackerFF• 3 months ago

Youngest totally self-made billionaires.

hedora3• 3 months ago

Isn’t this going to immediately become daily news?

Half the time I call a company they say “we are recording your voice for security / authentication purposes”.

The companies that do that have all the information on me that they require for me to set up an account, so their data breaches will be just like this one, but 1000x larger.

Can we just fast forward through the part where this works for ID theft, past the firefox age verification plugin that uses these datasets, and even through the part where people in the plugin dataset are digital outcasts (this voice has been used too many times. Want to try another?)

At the end of this dark predictable tunnel, maybe there will be a ban on biometrics for important stuff, a repeal of the age verification laws, and actual privacy legislation with teeth.

tracker1• 3 months ago

I'm pretty sure Google and Apple already have some decent examples of a LOT of people's voices in concert with other data collation. Google Voice IIRC was bought for audio sampling voicemail in the first place. Not sure if Apple has done similar, but would be more surprised if they didn't... Let alone the voice search options for both.

AntiUSAbah• 3 months ago

I'm curious: if i create an online sample from my voice, might this make it a lot harder for an AI model to identify me if every trainingdata contains my particular voice sample?

AtNightWeCode• 3 months ago

Where I live there was a common scam to manipulate voice recordings from phone calls. I was very careful back then with phone calls when I ran my own business. Like 15 years ago. Kinda crazy that any service would use voice recognition today as stated.

squirrelon• 3 months ago

40k people are not under thread, I am getting AI contractor job offers every month on UpWork, I am glad I haven't accepted more than one as it is just not worth to do.

meric_• 3 months ago

Is this post not just an ad for a vibe coded site / product? It adds no new info on the mercor breach and advertises something which I presume has even worse safety practices

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 months ago

What does an attacker actually do with thirty seconds of someone's clean read voice plus a scan of their driver's license?

I could think of quite a few things. I know that my bank and brokerage use voice ID.

throwaway677434• 3 months ago

I saw the red flags immediately when I stumbled across them a year ago maybe. I'm really not surprised.

yesman_x• 3 months ago

If this is real, the bigger issue might not even be the leak itself. It could be that we are quietly moving into a world where voice plus ID is enough to fully impersonate someone, and most systems are still not built for that reality.

flockonus• 3 months ago

How to check if your voice is being misused

I love that the answer here is basically.. - you don't -

But maybe mitigate at unreasonable personal costs.

How about services simply stop taking public information as proof of identity?

gyanchawdhary• 3 months ago

im the founder of a company that runs deepfake phishing simulations for enterprises, so biased on this one .. but the operational thing the piece misses is that this is the first widely circulated dump where voice, govt ID and selfie all came from the same onboarding session i.e. most enterprise call center auth still treats those as 3 independent factors ..

The scarier piece is that an attacker pulls a contractor from the dump, finds their employer on linkedin, then calls that companys IT helpdesk for a password reset with the cloned voice.

Fwiw we put up a free realtime face swap demo a while back at https://www.callstrike.ai/deepfake-security-training .. worth a look if you want to actually feel how trivial this has gotten.

Oravys5• 3 months ago

Great point about the helpdesk vector. The LinkedIn-to-IT-reset path is a brilliant illustration of how social engineering chains work. And you're right that audio is the frontier video deepfake detection has gotten really good, lots of great tools out there. Audio is the next wave, and the teams building solutions for real-world call quality are going to unlock a massive market. Exciting space to be in.

interludead3• 3 months ago

This is exactly why "voice as authentication" feels like a dead end to me

Oravys5• 3 months ago

It feels like a dead end because it's being used wrong. "Is this John's voice?" is the wrong question. "Does this call look like how John normally calls?" is way more interesting. Same device, same time of day, same way of starting a sentence. That whole pattern is much harder to fake than a voice alone. The authentication isn't dead, it just needs to grow up from a single check into a full picture.

miohtama• 3 months ago

Now open Chinese models can catch up

terobyte• 3 months ago

Open Source now?

kumarski• 3 months ago

I was floating near some ex agency and GS15 folks yesterday in Houston, they explained to me that the Israeli cybersecurity apparatus has had everyone's voicemails for the last 20 years because they inserted themselves into the supply chain of voicemails somehow or another.

Kind of nuts all the ways audio data can be used now.

trollbridge• 3 months ago

A few Israeli companies supply the software used to record phone calls when you call customer service.

kleiba2• 3 months ago

If you had a company, why not just tell all customers that their data is save but don't waste any money on security at all: in case of a breach, just write an apology email to your clients, promise a full investigation, and move on.

Obviously, you don't have to face any legal consequences, so why worry?

Sorry for the rant... but I just find this lack of liability frustrating.

popcorncowboy• 3 months ago

I like this. I'm genuinely curious whether you could create a Delve [0] for security. Companies could pay for the "security review and package and dashboard" virtue signal, put an impressively secure looking logo on their site and effectively whitewash needing to do anything else. I suspect a sufficiently expensive law firm could draft the requisite legals to shield the principals SecCo from the eventual unveiling, but not before SecCo could make hundreds of millions and the rest of the industry could save hundreds of millions on their shit-as-fuck security practices anyway. Call the spade a spade.

0 - https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/delve-accused-of-misleadin...

GS_Projects• 3 months ago

Mercor had a SOC 2, an MSA, all the right clauses. Voices still leaked. The apology email writes itself.

Why is voice and biometric stuff still server-side at all in 2026? Whisper.cpp runs on a phone. WebGPU works. Half these "we keep your voice secure" pipelines could run in the browser today.

The real reason isn't capability. It's cost. Centralised compute is cheaper to run, but that math only holds if you don't price in the periodic breach. Which nobody does until it's their own employees on the leak list.

GypsyKing716• 3 months ago

Its weird how 404 looks a lot like Claude Code CSS output itself. Is it just me?

AI generated and submitted Ycombinator story?

GorbachevyChase• 3 months ago

I was really hoping this was a leak of Warhammer 40K voice samples, but alas. My dreams of an imperial AI voice assistant go unrealized.

4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

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