The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

https://smarterarticles.co.uk/the-three-second-theft-why-ai-voice-fraud-outruns-every-defence

by dxs • 7 days ago

191 245 7 days ago

smarterarticles.co.uk

One reasonably effective defense: "Okay, let me call you right back." Yes, there's always the whole "my phone is dead, I borrowed someone else's" or "I'm calling from a jail payphone", so I think it might become common practice to start making authentication phrases or "tell me something only we know".

Another pillar of basic trust that's being eroded on an industrial scale. Sigh.

ActionHank• 7 days ago

I mostly answer unknown calls with monotone "hello" and then wait for their introduction before talking normally.

ghaff• 7 days ago

I mostly just don't answer them unless it seems like something that may be legit.

jonathanlydall3• 7 days ago

I think it's a somewhat South African cultural thing, but when I get calls from businesses or spammers, the first thing the caller tends to say is "Hello, how are you?", which is completely stupid when you're calling someone who wouldn't know who you are, so it tends to immediately make me annoyed that they don't know that they should have introduced themselves first.

As 99% of the time these are spam calls, I used to respond with something like "I'm fine, but who are you / do I know you?", but that was pretty much always inefficient as that might say their name (which from a spammer is useless information), maybe a sales pitch "how much do you spend on x?" or maybe something deliberately misleading about their company and saying something like <major brand name> even though they're some independent sales crowd getting commission selling contracts for them.

Eventually I found that the most effective response is "Sorry. Where are you calling from and what is this in regard to?" which I've found without fail seems to surprise, disarm them and immediately elicit whether the call is a waste of my time. At which point I either become very friendly (because it's a call I'm expecting) or I simply respond with "Sorry, not interested, goodbye." and immediately put down the phone.

I just want the disruption to be as minimal as possible and to not let myself even get an emotional reaction from it, so I don't want to get annoyed at them, never mind wasting time telling them off, besides, I suspect that my ruthlessly efficient getting rid of them without them even having a chance to try their pitch is received as a super cold shoulder, akin to being told to f-off.

fhdkweig4• 7 days ago

I answer with silence. I wait for them to speak first. Not even once has a scammer ever spoken first. I say nothing, they say nothing for a full minute before they hang up.

intended• 7 days ago

The opening example is of a person listening to their daughter’s voice on an unknown number, how would calling them back help? Or am I missing something obvious?

wccrawford• 7 days ago

The example in the article says the police took her phone. Then her "attorney" gets on to talk instead.

Yes, having a secret code is probably the right answer. My wife's family always has, but mine doesn't. I suppose we should probably fix that.

sudb• 7 days ago

For extra security against these text-to-speech model zero-shot clones, you might also want to use made-up gibberish words for which the pronunciation can't be reliably inferred from the spelling

croes• 7 days ago

Family OTP helps against passphrase leakage

etchalon• 7 days ago

We're gonna need two-way passwords for conversations.

Fun.

jonathanlydall3• 7 days ago

In practice this often doesn't work.

Article said the imposter in this case claimed her phone had been confiscated.

Fraudsters tend to also plan things such that the impersonated person can't be reached by phone at that time, either by choosing a time when they somehow know they're unavailable (e.g. impersonated person posted on social media they're boarding a plane) or in one case (12 years ago though) my SIL's parent's landline was bombarded with spam calls until they decided to leave the phone off the hook at which point the scammers phoned bank who couldn't reach the parents on their main line, of course this was the bank's problem (and there was probably an inside person facilitating) so they got their money back, but still a major inconvenience for the victim.

Probably the only sure advice is to be exceptionally wary of phone calls with supposed extreme time pressures to send the money now.

ryandrake• 7 days ago

Probably the only sure advice is to be exceptionally weary of phone calls with supposed extreme time pressures to send the money now.

Quick note: you mean “wary” instead of “weary” there.

briffle• 7 days ago

our family has had a special 'code word' we have had since the kids were in elementary school. If someone ever needed to pick up our kids from school (they never did) our kids were taught to ask for that word.

This is a good reminder that we should review that, since its been 10 years or so.

jasondigitized• 7 days ago

This. All of this is a solved problem. It's just not a thing that most families do and do regularly. Code word, insider info, etc. "Oh I am so sorry you got arrested Tommy. Before I wire the $, where did we go on vacation last year?'

dwa3592• 7 days ago

me and my wife made up a word in 2024 for this. the word doesn't exist in any language. we say it to each other all the time. even if i give you the spelling for it, you will say it wrong. i recommend everyone to do something similar. i should do it with my parents too.

pjc50• 7 days ago

Another pillar of basic trust that's being eroded on an industrial scale.

Remember, trust is like a rainforest: takes a long time to grow, provides a valuable ecosystem essential to human life, but can also be burned down for a quick profit.

ThrowawayTestr3• 7 days ago

They make you give a voice sample now when you're arrested. You need to do so in order to use the phone.

dec0dedab0de2• 7 days ago

who is they?

ThrowawayTestr3• 7 days ago

The US government

reactordev5• 7 days ago

What’s terrible is each time I am forced to call the bank, the more they try to tell me voice ID is secure and want me to provide my voice to authenticate. Never. Did ya’ll never play Uplink? With voice cloning as good as it is now, there’s no way a voice ID is secure enough for authentication.

fouc• 7 days ago

name and shame the bank

reactordev5• 7 days ago

rofl, IYKYK

eclipticplane• 7 days ago

Schwab still does voice passwords. "At Schwab, my voice is my password"

https://www.schwab.com/voice-id

Havoc3• 7 days ago

Yeah my bank does the same except don’t think there is an opt out.

Kinda crazy

reactordev5• 7 days ago

Spam 0, you’ll eventually get some customer service agent

tjoff• 7 days ago

My voice is my passport.

(never heard of anyone actually using that in real life, sounds uttery insane)

fhdkweig4• 7 days ago

Vanguard keeps pushing it. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vanguard+voice+verification

saltcured2• 7 days ago

I find so many of these things utterly insane. Much like the way a fax of a signed document is considered legally meaningful. I think we have to stop pretending any kind of digital media presentation of a document, face, voice, etc. can be authenticated by its content.

We really need to get to the point where any legally-binding digital authentication MUST be rooted in an in-person identity-proofing and authenticator binding ritual. Something you perform in front of a trained official, where physical inspection and local demonstration/activation of the authenticator is possible. This should be the basic standard to associate digital authenticators used in KYC legal and financial scenarios. The outcome should be some kind of standard digitally-signed certificate which can then be presented to KYC-compliant vendors to link the authenticator to a legal identity when establishing or maintaining financial accounts and records.

Perhaps there could be tiered certificates, where a high-stakes one would require this to be done in a secure facility where you expose yourself to risk of immediate arrest if presenting falsifiable identity claims. A more typical and decentralized version might be an upgrade of the notary public system in the US. Some kind of public digital ledger should record these certifications as well as revocations done by complementary rituals.

For social or informal accounts without KYC goals, some of this same machinery could be adopted. Simply modify or downgrade the identity-proofing part of the ritual as appropriate. This could link into other strategies like PGP web-of-trust or lesser kinds of identifiers like possession of phone numbers, email addresses, etc.

There would need to be criminal liability for officials misbehaving and certifying such identity and authenticator bindings without performing the requisite identity-proofing procedures.

reactordev5• 7 days ago

I agree but this can be done today with current tech. All you need to do is incorporate the full picture.

Something you are (biometrics, voice id, whatever)

Something you know (PIN, super secret password, your dog's mothers maiden name)

Something you have (MFA, AuthCode, PushNotif)

And even then, be cautious of anything that would be deemed an "admin" operation. Such as transfering of funds, issuing a check, or adding an external account.

revolvingthrow2• 7 days ago

The problem described in the article is unsolvable, given that a mid-range desktop from a few years ago can easily clone a voice that's convincing enough and there are no guardrails to those. Some silly KYC laws might limit a highschool kid making deepfakes of his crush, but once a model exists it's trivial to spread it around, and for organized groups to get ahold of those. Similar will happen with images, it's just that nobody with any serious money bothered releasing image gen models that compete with gemini or chatgpt -- but it's just a question of time. A year or three, what difference does it really make?

As the cost goes down to near-zero you can scale it up almost infinitely, especially if the profits are high enough to get some smart people working on the problem, which going by the article is already the case ("INTERPOL's finding that AI-enhanced fraud is four and a half times more profitable than the traditional kind"; incidents rose by 26% last year). If AI does succeed on mutilating white collar work enough there will be a large supply of knowledge workers that might just join International Scam Co. rather than have their families go homeless. Drowning man clutching at straw and all.

So if technologically it's impossible to prevent and societally it's impossible to prevent (like the attorney that got pwned same as the grandma), I'm not sure if there exists an answer that isn't worse than the thing it's supposed to prevent. I suppose we'll soon be in a situation where nothing we don't directly perceive in real life is provably true. That journalism and media in general seem to be in a deep crisis of trustworthiness means that you won't even get the benefit of the chain-of-trust as a proxy for whether something is or isn't real.

Ignoring everything happening outside of your immediate surroundings is a choice, and probably even good for people's mental health, but my gut feeling is that it does make humanity as a whole dumber and disempowered. What does corruption matter if nobody cares, or even hears about it? It was AI generated by $current_enemy anyway; nothing to see here, citizen.

TacticalCoder• 7 days ago

I don't know about that but finding excuses for the scum of this earth is certainly not a solution.

Take Europe for example: nobody dies of hunger in Europe. And yet there are plenty of thieves. People stealing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of EUR aren't doing it to "feed their families".

Think of the situation today. Think of the victims today. Instead of thinking of tomorrow's hypothetical situation where supposedly all the honest fathers out of work would join the crime syndicate, think of today's victims.

Projecting your own insecurity about the future to excuse scummy behavior by the scum of this earth is of no help.

There are people, right now, who have a roof. Who have a family. And who are fucking scums stealing the hard earned money of others because they choosed the easy life of crime.

Zero tolerance for such motherfuckers. I care about the victims and you should too.

revolvingthrow2• 7 days ago

Not sure I understand the argument.

Obviously there are people who help themselves to others' money if given the chance no matter the circumstances. But if the circumstances change so that people DO start going hungry or homeless, which is a rather obvious side effect of AI-but-not-AGI maximalism brightly espoused by our overlords sama and amodei of the "I can’t wait to make half the knowledge workers worldwide obsolete" variety, the scale of the problem will obviously get worse, as well as the type of people you can get involved if you’re in the international scam market.

rightbyte• 7 days ago

scum of the earth
fucking scums
Zero tolerance for such motherfuckers

Who watches the watchers etc.

We will just end up with some jingoist dude that will go after us instead.

Slow reforms to regulate the banking industry with this "identity theft" nonsense...

technothrasher• 7 days ago

Take Europe for example: nobody dies of hunger in Europe.

Nobody? France, as the most extreme example, has a rate of 1.52 per 100K. That's about a thousand people a year. That is certainly a small percentage of the population, but it isn't "nobody".

https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit...

cik• 7 days ago

Yet all of this can be easily defeated with soft language. The basic check "what's the password/verification word" will defeat this every time. This is basically opsec that we taught my grandparents, who were in their 90s. Its doable.

tantalor2• 7 days ago

Yes but that's more of a mitigation than prevention. It's an additional step, you have to remember to do it, and under the pressure of the situation you might easily forget to do it.

hyperhello2• 7 days ago

So they trick the kid out of the password first by calling them and pretending to be the parent.

greygood• 7 days ago

Code words break down emotionally. Many seniors do not reliably trust their own memory during a frightening call

tantalor2• 7 days ago

Could be prevented by more advanced "AI detection", especially on calls from unknown numbers.

It doesn't even have to be based on watermarking. It could be as simple as, "hold on a sec your AI countermeasure was listening and noticed you got this suspicious call, please be aware this may be a scam. Here is what you should do next..."

cogman103• 7 days ago

The problem described in the article is unsolvable

Well, not completely unsolvable. But nobody would like the solution.

What all these scams rely on is a way to transfer money in an irrevocable fashion. Restrict that in meaningful ways and you end a lot of the abilities for these scams to operate.

You could, for example, outlaw gift cards as a start. You could force the likes of Western Union to have a holding period before releasing money. Crypto would be hard as any regulation against it is pretty easily circumvented, but you could outlaw crypto currency exchanges (I'd worry less about crypto though as it's pretty hard for grandma to reliably setup).

loumf• 7 days ago

Also cash? Scammers will (and do) send a mule to your house to pick up boxes of cash.

SoftTalker2• 7 days ago

Also education. No court or attorney is going to demand payment of any fines or bail in gift cards or send a courier to pick up cash.

High schools should teach how to spot a scam. As others have observed, this is not a new one, it's just gotten more high-tech and convincing. This is one of many practical things our schools should teach about that they just don't.

natebc2• 7 days ago

(I'd worry less about crypto though as it's pretty hard for grandma to reliably setup)

These scumbags send grandma to a Bitcoin ATM.

fhdkweig4• 7 days ago

(I'd worry less about crypto though as it's pretty hard for grandma to reliably setup).

Difficulty in setting up a money transfer is not a hindrance. I have heard stories of scammers walking someone through the entire process to getting a mortgage on a house on the A&E Intervention episode of Greg. If they think you have money and they think you are gullible, they will devote time and effort to getting it.

skybrian• 7 days ago

This blog is kind of an interesting hybrid:

Every article published on SmarterArticles is authored and editorially controlled by Tim Green. Artificial intelligence tools are used within a structured and supervised workflow as research and drafting instruments. All arguments, framing decisions, source selections, and final publication choices remain human-directed and under my full responsibility.

There are references at the bottom, but I would have preferred direct links or footnotes within the article. Also, direct quotes are nice. I didn’t notice any glaring AI cliches.

aqfamnzc• 7 days ago

I suspect this is much more common than you're imagining. I think it'd be silly for publishers of any kind, really, to not use AI tools for things like fact checking and so on.

rda2• 7 days ago

Interesting, something about the phrasing and pacing felt like AI to me, but not a model I’m familiar with - I guess that’s why. Usually I close articles once I realize they’re AI written, but this one was mild enough that I finished the whole thing.

saaaaaam2• 7 days ago

Interesting. To me it reeks of AI, and the first major tell was the first paragraph, at which point I stopped reading.

No human had. The crying had been synthesised from a fragment of audio, and the daughter she thought she was rescuing existed only as a pattern of numbers in someone else's machine.

Brendinooo• 7 days ago

Yeah, I can't explain it but the headings feel very AI. And there are a bunch of things in the text that remind me of chats I have with Claude during the day job

and it is worth being clear about why
The emotional mechanism the scam exploits is not a gap in knowledge that a leaflet can fill; it is the love a person has for their grandchild, weaponised
These are not the numbers of a credulous minority being separated from pocket money. They are the numbers of a generation's accumulated savings being drained
that a fraud requiring the absolute frontier of machine learning can be perpetrated against an ordinary grandmother in her kitchen, at scale, for the price of nothing

(To be clear this isn't automatically disqualifying to me. But I am interested in LLM writing patterns and my ability to detect them. And in the case of this article I sense the kind of linguistic padding that has made Claude a little harder to work with in the more recent Opus point releases because it obscures the most important bits of information.)

vidarh2• 7 days ago

That's pure generic "I'm getting paid by the word" article writing. If it reads to AI to you it's in part because AI has been trained on a billion articles like that.

Aurornis2• 7 days ago

Artificial intelligence tools are used within a structured and supervised workflow as research and drafting instruments.

This has become the highbrow way of admitting that AI is writing the articles: Calling it “drafting” is another way of saying that the article was written by AI and the person publishing it maybe reviewed it. Maybe they skimmed it and published it directly.

For what it’s worth the article felt obviously AI heavy to my first read.

pessimizer• 7 days ago

Calling it “drafting” is another way of saying that the article was written by AI and the person publishing it maybe reviewed it.

I don't think that's a safe assumption. You could construct an article pretty quickly if you had a topic, a few points to hit, a conclusion and a short list of links, then fed that to the machine. All the LLM would be doing is fluffing it up with worthless words, unnecessary metaphors and maybe a pop culture reference or two so it looks like what people expect from an "article."

"Rewrite this as a slate dot com article"

If it were an email newsletter instead, there wouldn't be that fluffy expectation and you could just leave the bullet points and links as they were.

stronglikedan2• 7 days ago

A good example of someone using AI as a tool and owning their output they should. The craftsman is still responsible for straightening the bent nail, even if it were the hammer that slipped.

offsign• 7 days ago

Sounds like AI is just greasing the wheels of a long established 'grandparent scam'... goes something like this:

1) voice one: young adult calls, sobbing 2) grandparent inquires with a name... "Ben, is that you?" 3) voice one: "Yes grandma, it's me, Ben... I'm in trouble, please don't tell mom 4) voice two: "Hello, I'm attorney..."

My grandmother fell victim to this almost 20 years ago, which only stopped when Western Union refused to let her continue sending wires... she was forced to call her daughter (at which point they just called my brother.)

Our takeaway (at the time)... the voice doesn't even need to be terribly accurate, since the original interaction is brief / somewhat inaudible over the tears. Typically just requires an older vulnerable adult, a lucky strike with the initial setup (e.g. grandparent actually has a grandkid), and a lot of high pressure / duress salesmanship.

Foobar8568• 7 days ago

I told my parents that I will never ask for money, doesn't matter the situation, even with live video, it's trivial to generate live audio and video nowadays.

I hope they got the message.

abirch2• 7 days ago

Fortunately for me, my parents wouldn't be able to get the live video working.

saidnooneever3• 7 days ago

i agreed key phrases. id recommend it. something unrelated to the family and totally arbitrary, agreedupon only verbally. (or write it down for them if they are old and memory is an issue. you can remind them to read your note out loud.. easy).

this way, you do not footgun yourself in the event you'd ever need to ask something. Money isnt the only thing they can ask, and no one (i think) has a glass orb to tell their future and know for certain such a call would never happen. its easy to think it wont happen to you, i think that is most peoples' sentiment until it does. (having a need for help from family that is)

chrisjj4• 7 days ago

They might not believe it - for good reason.

stronglikedan2• 7 days ago

I recently did the same, and I, too, hope they got the message. We agreed that there is nothing that needs to be acted upon immediately, and that anything questionable would be discussed with the whole family first.

root-parent2• 7 days ago

The best things to stop these AI voice schemes, is to agree on a family password. The cloned AI voice will not known it.

f1ay5• 7 days ago

That wasn't enough for my mom. I went through an identical scenario, and about 6 months after we had the conversation she got hit.

psygn89• 7 days ago

I remember my JROTC instructor also running into that and how she said afterwards they have a secret phrase between them two as a way of verifying it's truly them.

throwaway89201• 7 days ago

It's very, very hard for untrained people to be strict about verifying any secret phrase. The attacker can make all kinds of excuses, while creating urgency, and many people quickly abandon verifying the phrase. A scene in One Battle After Another comes to mind.

saidnooneever3• 7 days ago

lucky strike is the key here they can do this with VOIP really easily to massive amounts of numbers. its staggering amounts if you look at the traffic really. worst is if they proxy that via residential proxy services which often come from end-user / individuals phones so the traffic is hard to detect for carriers etc. since it looks like a regular VOIP app connection.

glaslong• 7 days ago

"Greasing the wheels" seems right in principle, but possibly putting the accelerant factor a bit... mildly. Like going from burning the turkey in the oven, to deep frying and burning your whole house down.

cybercrime losses across the United States rose 26 per cent in a single year
The FBI was candid that even these figures understate the problem. AI attribution in the report reflects only what victims recognised and reported, and most victims of a cloned-voice call never learn that a machine was involved at all.
INTERPOL found that AI-enhanced fraud is roughly four and a half times more profitable than its traditional equivalent, and that so-called agentic AI systems can now autonomously plan and execute entire fraud campaigns, from reconnaissance through to the ransom demand.

Forgeties793• 7 days ago

To build on your point, I have this comment I wrote months ago that I end up pasting (or pasting a bit altered) probably every week:

“Before LLM’s there was_____” I see this whenever an LLM’s impact is assessed. We know. The issue is scale and the ability for smaller and smaller groups (down to individuals) to execute at scale.

LLM’s are pouring massive amount of gasoline on existing issues and people just keep shrugging. Fake news always existed. Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example) at a scale previously unimaginable - or in this case, can target even more vulnerable elderly populations far more effectively.

People could always die crossing a street. Still, cars changed the discussion about pedestrian safety pretty materially. People didn’t simply throw up their hands and go “people have always been able to die crossing the street.”

trhaynes• 7 days ago

YC S27's ScamMyGrandparents.com lets you simulate these against your own grandparents, so you can shame and educate them when they naively wire your college trust fund to a safe account. You are able to refund either the whole amount, or keep some for yourself since they won't know any better. The cost of service is variable depending on how many homes they own.

ikesau• 7 days ago

You got me excited, because I've wanted something like this for a while. Obviously without the actual extortion, but everything up to that point. White hat scamming, to teach our parents what it's actually like before it happens.

exolymph• 7 days ago

I read this comment and was like "but what is their business model?" before I realized

f1ay5• 7 days ago

You got me dead to rights with this, because I literally bought dontscamgrandma.com earlier this week and it took a heart jumping second to catch the joke.

We're staying away from the trust funds and shame though.

red-iron-pine2• 6 days ago

in 2026 grift is the way of life, not crazy to see YC going that way eventually

pavel_lishin4• 7 days ago

It's not "just" greasing the wheels, because previously each call required a human being to spend the equivalent amount of time on the phone with a victim, interacting with them - you couldn't just play a cassette tape at them, you know?

And it likely requires working with other people, your "employees", who are both a liability, and a cost.

With AI, you can make a thousand calls in parallel, for significantly cheaper, out of your own basement.

This greases the wheels of voice fraud like a gatling gun greases the wheels of hitting a guy with a rock.

written-beyond• 7 days ago

Sounds like something gogograndparent can add as a VAS

imoverclocked• 7 days ago

So, you answer your phone to the scam and… now they have your voice too.

Talking on the phone is now an unmitigated liability.

gilleain• 7 days ago

The only solution? Answer the phone in an over the top comedy accent, such as Simpsons characters, or just whatever comes to mind.

andrepd• 7 days ago

I actually fucking do this, and have done for a year or two. Sad state of affairs.

matltc2• 7 days ago

A terse, altered "Hello" is all I say. Sometimes I don't say anything. Most humans would wait a few seconds then prompt with "...Hello?", whereas bots tend to hang up after ~2s silence

amanaplanacanal• 7 days ago

I just don't answer the phone. If it's important, they can leave a message.

abirch2• 7 days ago

A few years back, I would talk with scammers for a while to waste their time. Now I don't.

LPT: Please have a codeword or phrase that you use with your loved ones so even if the scammers use your voice, they won't know the phrase.

TomK32• 7 days ago

I'm getting a lot of calls recently and don't give them more than a Hello and whatever music, radio show or Tour de France broadcast I'm listening to. Sometimes they hang in there for half a minute.

Hackbraten• 7 days ago

LPT: Please have a codeword or phrase that you use with your loved ones

They keep refusing ideas like these on the grounds of them being “not stupid” and “able to see through such attempts immediately, 100% of the time” and “do you think we’re stupid?”

iron_ball• 7 days ago

The article mentions this strategy, and points out that when confronted with an emotional emergency situation, the victims simply might not remember to use the protocol.

Not a bad idea, but not a brick wall.

baxtr• 7 days ago

I somewhere read about a service that would use AI generated voices to combat these scam calls, basically talking to the forever. Forgot the name though...

kerridge0• 7 days ago

It's Lenny

christkv2• 7 days ago

We all have a safe word in the family just for this issue to identify if it´s the real person or not.

xp849• 7 days ago

Someone else pointed out how easy it would be to make a video of anyone having a finger cut off, or similar torture, to scare the victim into believing that the “grandchild” forgot their password and needs you to override the password protocol to save their other 9 fingers. I have to agree. That’s like 80¢ of compute to do. If that’s effective even 30% of the time, it means “just have a password” doesn’t make you safe.

christkv2• 6 days ago

I mean that's a pretty extreme example though. It can be mostly gotten past by using the method used with alarm companies. One "danger" password and one "safe" password.

codedokode3• 7 days ago

What are legitimate uses for copying someone's voice without permission? I see none. Those scientists are just helping criminals to fully automate scamming and governments to create fake videos.

AStrangeMorrow• 7 days ago

Well of course as you pointed out the legitimate one would be copying voices WITH permission (yours, someone you know who gives authorization, through contracts for movies/bots etc). The model can’t differentiate between voices for which you have permission or not.

But more generally while recordings might be copyrighted, the voice itself isn’t so copying a voice isn’t a crime, at least as it currently stands. You cannot however use said voice for deceptive practices. You can however for advertisement (needs permission). And in the US you can for satire, at least in the US, withOUT permission (falls under the 1st amendment).

codedokode3• 7 days ago

Maybe the voice should be copyighted or protected then, I do not want anyone use to my voice, let them use their own boring afwully sounding voice. I am sure such models are used in 99% cases for illegal purposes or creating fake news.

Also, one's likeness (like face image) should also be protected from being used by anyone.

fhdkweig4• 7 days ago

Parody for one. Trey Parker and Matt Stone (of South Park) created a nice one that clones faces (but uses celebrity impersonators for voices).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassy_Justice

https://www.youtube.com/@SassyJustice/videos

Full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM

codedokode3• 7 days ago

They can do the parody using their own voices. There is no need for cloning someone's real voice.

fantasizr• 7 days ago

I've been waiting for a steelman argument why building the world's best deepfake machine is a good thing. Unironically cryptography could verify identity for all comms.

chrisjj4• 7 days ago

... the hardest for its victims to be believed about — because the evidence, by design, sounds exactly like someone they love.

Uh? Surely this makes believing the victims easy not hard to believe.

Its like revenge porn. "It's not me. It's a deepfake" is easy to believe.

laszlojamf• 7 days ago

AI definitely amplifies this problem, but it's not like it didn't exist before. Old people get scammed the old way all the time too. My mom calls me every once in a while asking about some freebie offer that she gets emailed from sketchy domains claiming to be spotify or something.

Not saying that "there's nothing we can do" or anything, but it does feel like this is one of those instincts that you develop growing up with the internet. Like, my first instinct reading that (and I hope getting that call) would be "what the hell is the lawyer doing at the scene". You have to treat _everything_ coming through your phone as potentially untrusted. I don't have any data on this, but it feels like my friends, and especially younger people, do that automatically.

The primary defence against all phishing is to tell yourself: nothing is ever really that urgent. Nothing is ever that good.

geor9e• 7 days ago

I fear this whenever I acidentally say too many words to a telemarketer/scam call.

butvacuum• 7 days ago

Welcome to Voice Print Identification. When you see the red light turn on please state in the following order: Your destination, Your nationality, and your Full Name.

LiteUser• 7 days ago

Moon, American, Floyd, Heywood R.

zuluworksai2• 7 days ago

If they were still around i would have to warn them for sure! Crazy stuff this new future!

zuluworksai2• 7 days ago

i wish i could still warn them...

arbuge• 7 days ago

"They kidnapped my daughter? That's terrible. Yes, I'll definitely pay the ransom but to get access to my bank account I need you to write a poem about corn and a curl script in PHP. Please go ahead."

Inspired by this headline I saw in the news today... haven't read the full article yet: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/now-defenders-are-e...

lowbloodsugar2• 7 days ago

It requires, second, regulating the supply of the weapon

Heavy sigh. The “weapon” is software. It cannot be regulated unless we live in the fascist dystopia where I have to ask the governments approval to run any piece of software.

zengid• 7 days ago

One regulation i would like to see is some auditory fingerprint in an AI voice where any person can immediately recognize their speaking to a clanker but it's not unpleasant.

It should be illegal to "impersonate" a human voice.

gattr• 7 days ago

That ship has sailed, no? Plenty of code for voice generation out there already, you'd basically have to ban general computing.

logifail• 7 days ago

These scammers are breaking the law already, why would breaking yet another law matter to them?

wrs2• 7 days ago

Everyone suffers from this, not just the scam victims. I opened a bank account for a new business this year, and the friction for doing perfectly normal things was ridiculous due to the bank’s paranoia about scams. I couldn’t even make an initial deposit from my previous business, or transfer money to my personal account, without triggering a fraud alert and freezing the entire account (couldn’t even log into the bank website) until I could call and verify that it really was me on both ends of the transaction.

dieselgate• 7 days ago

From a business perspective genuinely curious to know general location and bank name for this. In WA state I've only dealt with minor scrutiny (from credit union not bank) asking if the business is involved with cannabis otherwise it's been easy.

wrs2• 7 days ago

This was Chase, in WA. Part of the problem may be that I used an address on the account application that didn't match the one on the state company registration. Rather than let me update the application, they required that I update the state registration to match it ($50 fee btw). (To be clear, both addresses were current and valid.) That may have set some kind of risk flag that increased scrutiny later.

But they were specifically worried about the transfers being scams -- at least, that's what they said. They insisted on calling my other bank to verify that I was in fact the owner of the other business account. And I know there's been a big increase in things like fake real-estate scams, so paranoia is understandable.

However, the way bank fraud/risk departments work is generally completely opaque. I've previously had Bank of America refuse to open an account, with no reason given and no possible recourse. And I can't imagine a much more vanilla, boring, good-credit person than me, so I have no idea what set them off!

pmarreck3• 7 days ago

Arrange a secret phrase in advance- ideally generated randomly. Stick it up on the wall of the aging parent or grandparent- maybe in the bedroom, where guests are unlikely to go. Make it innocuous-looking (hidden in plain sight). Require that phrase to be said to prove identity. Reset it if it ever gets used on a call legitimately.

ButlerianJihad2• 7 days ago

Personally, I require all my aging grandparents to carry a Yubikey, with an identical one always stored in a safe-deposit box. Then, on demand, they simply mate their Yubikey with a specially-prepared GrapheneOS device, open their Firefox app, and connect to the dedicated mesh network, run by and for aging grandparents. Then they run their right ring finger over the fingerprint sensor, but it must be done in a Morse-code pattern that matches their unique tattoo (I am unable to divulge the location or encoding of this tattoo). Once these conditions are met, their physical presence is confirmed by the Yubikeys of at least 2 other aging grandparents of equal or higher reputation.

It's really simple and straightforward, and there is no need to really document the workflow here, because all the aging grandparents are extensively trained and drilled every two weeks, by the aging great-grandparents who've been using this same exact system for the past 50 years.

ButlerianJihad2• 7 days ago

Seriously though, I'd like to make two points:

1: Your family members already have shared "secrets" if they communicate regularly. It could be pet names, terms of endearment, shared experiences, unique monikers for things. It's language that is already familiar and you already use quite often. You should leverage that, and rely on that familiarity in a crisis, rather than trying to contrive something special for crisis-only ID. The attackers' greatest weapon is your own confusion, your own willingness to believe, and creating a sense of urgency. Your attackers' 3 greatest weapons. Don't panic.

2: My maternal grandmother was widowed and lived alone for decades. She had certain ways of knowing things. For example, every time we'd come home, she would test the doorknob. If some stranger had come and tried to jiggle the doorknob, we could tell by its feel. Just a simple mechanical giveaway. When Mom and/or Dad came by, they rang the doorbell by a special pattern. It wasn't complex, but it was distinct and recognizable from inside. It wasn't a securely encrypted ID, just a "secondary ring" that was unlike a stranger's touch on the doorbell button. And, of course, my parents can always interpret the antics of their indoor cat, in regards to who is approaching the house by car or on foot...

pmarreck3• 7 days ago

LOL.

saltcured2• 7 days ago

Sad times are coming for a lot of families and individuals. It isn't just that technology is upending our naive ideas of trust and authenticity. This is, essentially, the broad class of "confused deputy" attacks. And the robust mitigation is to disempower the easily confused deputy, rather than to think you can block confusing signals.

A looming problem with shifts in demographics and family structure is that many people will be slipping into cognitive decline without a formal transition to address their incompetence. Sadly, there is a point where the older person really needs to permanently delegate important decision-making to a trusted third party. They should no longer be legally empowered to authorize funds transfers, sign contracts, or even make medical decisions.

We're not really setup to handle this well. Not at the systemic level of protecting people from themselves, and not at the personal level of relinquishing control over our own lives. So we often have to let the sufferer fumble along and cause a lot of damage before the protections eventually kick in.

And, ironically, these protection mechanisms can also be corrupted into another scam and form of abuse. To totally de-risk would require some kind of time travel or perfect foresight. But in the real world, the damage is often not fully reversible when it is detected after the fact.

pavel_lishin4• 7 days ago

I think the hardest thing to come to terms with is not that this is the new reality, or even that this is soon going to be the new reality for our older relatives, but that this is coming for almost all of us.

Perseids• 7 days ago

I'm usually not one to focus on technological solutions given sociological problems, but this one seems to be a good exception. If we "just wanted to" [1] all this fake calls could be stopped by requiring strong authentication/authorization. We are very much used to just anybody being able to call my number, but that doesn't need to be the case. At the very least, cold calls should be treated as skeptical in the UI as instant messengers like Signal treat first messages. Probably this isn't enough, though, as it wouldn't have prevented the cases described in the article. Cold calling someone should probably require the caller to be traceable to a real, government-ID-verified person [2]. Even if that person is being defrauded themselves ("get a thousand bucks by installing this app and clicking a few screens") is would destroy the economics of the attack, as it would make each call expensive again.

[1] Structural inertia is the killer here. It will certainly not happen until the problem is huge enough.

[2] Exceptions can of course apply to numbers that are meant to primarily be cold called, like doctors offices. The callee possibly have to be specially trained to withstand this kind of attacks.

smallmancontrov3• 7 days ago

Speaking of which, what happened to SHAKEN/STIR? I thought the strong authentication requirements came down the pipe years ago and they were going to start turning off (or hiding by default) routes of low reputation. That was years ago, it was supposed to take years, but here we are years later and I still get loads of spam calls. What happened?

sdellis• 7 days ago

I never answer my phone if I don't know who is calling me.

atleastoptimal• 7 days ago

I wonder what percentage of the US GDP is "Fooling old people"

cwmoore• 5 days ago

Compare to enticing youth, compounded over decades

jdashg• 7 days ago

Disempowering deputies is how you end up with customer service that can't actually provide service to customers. Low-trust societies are a huge efficiency loss, and just a general pain in the ass if you are acting in good faith.

coldtea2• 7 days ago

How much "customer service" are we getting today, and of what quality?

bluefirebrand2• 7 days ago

Like it or not, the Earth is a very low trust community. Old people get scammed by scammers from all over. This is a global problem, not a local problem

The global community is very low trust, unfortunately. That might be an unfixable problem

armchairhacker3• 7 days ago

I think limited rights for old people are like limited rights for children: justified because there is cognitive decline, and every individual (except children who tragically die young) gets to live some life with full rights.

The biggest problem is that it’s depressing. A child gets to look forward to growing up and having full rights, an old person is already looking forward to declining and dying and the loss of rights reflects that. Another problem is that, just as some old people are scammed, taking away rights will have other old people abused by their “caretakers” (e.g. one relative hurting them and stealing from them even against other relatives, which already happens).

So I want to see it implemented but tied with our culture restoring respect for old people, giving them a sense of purpose, and looking out for those who aren’t our relatives. Specifically including reforming retirement homes, many which take advantage of their residents, and stronger safeguards against abusive relatives who (already are seizing and) abuse POA. I’d like to hear what old people themselves think, because maybe I don’t (empathetically) understand the consequences, but although maybe outside the Overton Window logically it seems reasonable.

YeGoblynQueenne• 7 days ago

Nothing to do with cognitive decline. From the article:

> It is tempting, and wrong, to attribute the targeting of older adults to naivety. The brief that prompts this article identifies a more uncomfortable truth: the characteristics that make older people disproportionately vulnerable are not deficiencies of intelligence but features of a life well lived. They tend to hold higher average savings balances, the accumulated product of decades of work, which makes them efficient targets — a single successful call can yield far more than one aimed at a younger person. They were raised in, and still operate within, established patterns of trust-based communication, in which a phone call from a distressed relative is answered as a genuine emergency rather than interrogated as a potential attack. They are, through no fault of their own, relatively unfamiliar with the existence of AI voice synthesis, having spent most of their lives in a world where a voice on the line was definitionally a person on the line. And they are exposed, like every parent and grandparent, to the particular emotional architecture of the family-emergency scenario, in which the instinct to protect a child overrides every slower, more sceptical faculty.

close04• 7 days ago

Children are legally differentiated from adults purely based on age, not some formal verification. You get extra rights and obligations at 18, that’s a very objective criterion.

Declaring someone mentally unfit is anything but objective and it’s very ripe for abuse.

f1ay5• 7 days ago

There's also the strain and discontent that comes with being the person who is taking away the rights and putting up guardrails for your loved ones. I opted not to do so for my mother shortly before she was scammed out of her life's savings, because I thought I could train her against scams.

ninalanyon2• 6 days ago

limited rights for old people

How old did you have in mind?

an old person is already looking forward to declining and dying

All of my colleagues who have died in old age (at least late seventies) did so in full command of their senses, one of them still contributing to international technical committees into their eighties.

Age is not a useful measure in this field.

butlike2• 7 days ago

and not at the personal level of relinquishing control over our own lives

No one wants to do that. Once you give up control of your life you're essentially dead. Why would I want to voluntarily cede my rights so I'm relegated to being pushed around in a wheel chair while all my decisions are made by others? Because it makes my children, the people too young to have any perspective on the situation, feel better?

reddit_clone• 7 days ago

A friend and his wife _almost_ fell victim to this last year, in Texas.

I think it is a standard script now. Call comes from police department. 'Your son hit a pregnant woman. He is about to be booked. You need to pay $$$$ yada yada'. With an authentic sounding voice conversation from their son.

In spite of several red flags (in hindsight) they withdrew $15K from bank, and somehow at the last minute pulled back.

Edit: Scammers know how to push the right buttons.

Animats• 7 days ago

This article is about the retail version of this kind of fraud. Impersonating CEOs is a thing, and the dollar amounts are much larger.

The attackers created AI-generated video and audio replicas of the CFO and other executives of the global engineering firm. These deepfakes were deployed in a live video call – not as a pre-recorded video, but as a real-time conference with multiple participants. The finance employee saw and heard his superiors in what appeared to be a normal conference situation. The instructions came through clearly and consistently. Urgency was created by framing the situation as a supposed corporate acquisition. Within a single session, he approved 15 individual transfers to various accounts in Hong Kong.[1] That fraud yielded US$25 million.

[1] https://www.securitytoday.de/en/2026/04/04/deepfake-attacks-...

dredmorbius2• 6 days ago

The possible silver lining of enterprise-scale fraud is that it might be the pain which finally pushes telephony / voice comms to adopt true call-level authentication and security.

This need not be a centralised security / authentication / identification system, but the protocols must be standardised and near-universally applied. If these rely on some hardware token (YubiKey, NFC ring, RSA keyfob OTP, or even a smartphone's native ID features).

The other side of this is that networks and carriers who transact largely fraudulent traffic must be penalised for this. I'd like to see both financial and technical penalities, e.g., ruinous fines, with a sufficiently large balance disqualifying the carrier from interconnect rights, and the right for terminating / bridging carriers to reject traffic in proportion to the level of malicious traffic logged.

(This also implies some distributed facility for monitoring traffic from various comms networks and sharing that information with carriers and other security provisioning parties.)

A worse outcome would be a two-tiered system in which large enterprises have access to reasonably fraud-free comms, and the rest of the world does not.

inferhaven• 7 days ago

Super interesting read, makes me wonder if audio data poisoning could be employed en masse to help defend against this kinda stuff

spenvo2• 7 days ago

This old post of mine may be of interest, where I point out: "After a bit of threat modeling, it becomes apparent that future spearphishing robocalls may not directly con you, but rather “farm” your voice data by asking you benign questions, and use that to train a voice model to penetrate more deeply into your network." A lot of this writing has been on the wall forever and many (I'm sure otherwise smart people in) mission critical industries like banking, ISPs, and more refused to even acknowledge the risks.

2021 - "Despite the prevalence of deepfake audio tech, banks and ISPs rush ahead with “voice print” authentication" https://keydiscussions.com/2021/12/07/despite-the-prevalence... ends with a section called "The next crisis: robocalls that spoof the voices of victims at scale"

franktankbank• 7 days ago

Do not answer calls from random numbers. When has that ever been a benefit?

spenvo2• 7 days ago

Telcos need to implement STIR/SHAKEN in a binding way and it needs to be fully integrated into iOS/Android's UI. Spammers call from spoofed numbers, even numbers of, say, local schools (or from other people in your business) - so, if you get a call from a school and you've got kids, would you pick up? A couple of years ago I got a text that was "sent" from my boss (he didn't send it), etc.. The numbers aren't random.

titanomachy• 7 days ago

most victims of a cloned-voice call never learn that a machine was involved at all. They believe, as Sharon Brightwell initially believed, that they spoke to their own child.

This doesn’t make any sense. At some point they will speak to their child and learn that the call wasn’t real.

neuroelectron• 7 days ago

Yet the government refuses to do anything about the massive amount of phone spam we get every day which is an open door to AI voice cloning. But won't anybody please think about the telecom profits?

linsomniac2• 7 days ago

A year ago I promoted the idea among my wife's family that we should establish a sign/countersign system for the family and use it regularly so that in the event of something like this we could positively identify a legit request.

Would have come in handy when our niece was traveling in Asia and asked for money a few times, but in this case it wasn't a scam.

I got no traction with it, which I was a bit surprised by because one of the family members works at the Puzzle Palace.

Cider9986• 7 days ago

A shared TOTP in an app could also work.

linsomniac2• 7 days ago

My concern there is that the friction is too high: it wouldn't be something that family members would use in casual conversation, and could also be written off by the AI: "They won't give me my phone", "I lost my phone", etc...

"Did you see that game last night" replied to with "The Visitors are my favorite team" is something you could say instead of "hi" as a family.

attila-lendvai• 7 days ago

It requires, second, regulating the supply of the weapon. [...]

i guess even local models can do this now, especially in non-interactive mode.

so, i have a hard time reading this part as mere naivitee, as opposed to enemy propaganda in support of mandatory digital ID's for everything. or for straight out criminalizing "unauthorized" compute altogether?

m463• 7 days ago

This makes me REALLY question "this call may be recorded for quality purposes"

Now other businesses are starting to reference their privacy policy at the beginning of a call, which leads me to think there are many more uses popping up for our recorded voice.

I'm sure a certain percentages of recordings of our voice "to stop fraud" might be used to start fraud.

ambicapter• 7 days ago

Maybe a good time to bring up (again) the fact we don't impose enough liability risk on companies that collect data willy-nilly.

milesvp• 7 days ago

Does anyone know if Ben Jordan's AI generated music algorithm would work here to spot fake voices? He's looking for compression artifacts introduced from the training data in the output music. I'd expect similar compression was used for training general voice data. Only issue I can think of is the compression of the audio link most of these scams are going to be using might mask the training data compression.

jongjong• 7 days ago

I'm kind of glad now that I had some really bad experiences in my career and experienced negative-trust environments.

When I told my parents some of what happened to me in my career, initially, I don't think they fully believed me because people in my stories behaved so differently than they're used to. My parents lived in an environment where they could expect reciprocity and money wasn't so difficult to come by that it would be worth risking prison time.

I kind of believe that a lot of people are essentially forced into fraud. I don't believe that they are necessarily bad people. A lot of people are just trying to get by.

So it's very important to convey to family members what kind of world we live in. I think most of my family members are essentially conspiracy theorists now.

semiquaver• 7 days ago

This article is 100% LLM generated according to pangram, which is a bit funny given its topic. I didn’t need the detector though; It is pretty grating, sounds like Claude Opus with its talk of “load-bearing” and such.

f1ay5• 7 days ago

So, full disclosure I’m a sec founder in the space, and was already planning on launching a solution deepfake “grandparent scams” right before hacker summer camp but this post was too on the nose to ignore so I ended up moving it up and launching the waitlist for dontscamgrandma.com tonight.

Long story short, some fraud associated events cropped up last year at work and I was concerned about my mom getting scammed, so we kitchen tabled it and I told her flat out will never ever call you asking for money" and walked her through some quick scenarios and left it there.

About 5 months later, someone called literally screaming, pretending to be me having just gotten into a car accident and killing a pregnant woman, then the phone transferred over to a 'lawyer' and she ended up getting scammed out of most of her life savings.

It sat really poorly with me, so I quit my dayjob at the end of last year and started silversight.ai to solve the ai scam / fraud problem for b2b, but I’ve been wanting to roll out something for regular people from the beginning. This post was the bump I needed to validate that other people were feeling the pressure.

So thanks for posting.

We have more features in the pipe, but as of today dontscamgrandma is backed by an engine that does regular recurring real time phone based training scenarios with an AI that roleplay's common grandparent scams with your loved one with the goal of getting them to recognize and defend themselves from sketchy calls.

Pretty excited to share it. Feedback welcomed https://dontscamgrandma.com

Mr_Minderbinder• 6 days ago

“He warned Brightwell not to tell the bank what the money was for…”

That should have been a red flag.

orbitalventures• 6 days ago

Sad sad times indeed, specially because AI empowers more those who seem to do wrong more than good. What we discovered is that implementing a double agent verification, specially in aging population is the way to mitigate. That is family members or more exposed members are required to have a double authorization notification for performing transactions. Banks are doing it quite well and is completely align with MFA. Of course this requires configuration of a trust circle among every person, and generates another avenues for abuse like was pointed. Sadly we are always running behind into protecting people.

The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

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