More fear than harm. In Arizona, criminals successfully cloned a teenage girl’s voice using artificial intelligence (AI) and demanded ransom from her mother by faking a kidnapping. reports nbc.
The teen’s mother, Jennifer DeStefano, says she received a call from an unknown phone number while her 15-year-old daughter was out skiing. At the end of the line, her daughter crying that she apologizes to her mother. Then a man speaks to him: “Listen to me. I have your daughter. That’s how it will be. If you call the police, I’ll drug her. Mexico,” says Jennifer DeStefano with the US media. She heard her daughter yell behind her, “Help me, Mom!”
The man then demanded a ransom of one million euros and then 500,000 euros. Reflexively, Jennifer DeStefano contacts the police, who confirm that her daughter has not been kidnapped at all and that she is fine.
More and more advanced tools
However, the mother was shocked by the resemblance to her daughter’s voice: “It was completely her voice and her intonation, the same way of crying.”
Voice copy technology has accelerated and its use is now becoming accessible to everyone. A few seconds of a video posted on social networks are enough for the AI to clone the voice, intonations and emotions, and this at a lower cost.
In 2022, fraud was one of the most committed crimes in the United States with more than 36,000 complaints, according to Federal Trade Commission data of which 5000 were made by phone, specifies the Washington Post.
Law enforcement and the courts remain ill-equipped to punish this type of scam, which continues to grow. Most victims have few elements to identify the perpetrator and it is always difficult for the police to trace calls.
Source: BFM TV
