Highly successful artificial intelligence texts, images, videos and sounds… All of these show the point where technology has come from lately. However, all this artificial intelligence content is not used for a good purpose. Artificial intelligence products that are indistinguishable from the real have become a tool of fraudsters. The last example of this is when a mother is convinced that her daughter has been kidnapped.Scammers use artificial voice cloning
Jennifer DeStefano, a mother living in Arizona, USA, said her daughter was called from a random phone number while she was in one of the dance studios. DeStefano said she wouldn’t normally pick up an unknown number, but worried that her other 15-year-old daughter, who was on a ski trip, might be in trouble, answered the call, and immediately afterwards her 15-year-old daughter sobbed, “Mom!” she heard her cry.
When panicked DeStefano asked what the problem was, he said the little girl said, “Mom, I messed up everything” and continued to sob. Before DeStefano could ask any more questions, he described a man shouting, “Put your head back, lie down” in the background of the phone. This unidentified man got on the phone and asked DeStefano to pay him $1 million for the safe return of his daughter. The scammer also said that if he called the police or anyone else, he would give his daughter drugs, use violence, and then drop her off to Mexico.Indistinguishable sounds
DeStefano states that at this point, he was completely trembling with fear and anxiety, and he heard his daughter’s pleas in the background. DeStefano told the man he didn’t have $1 million, and he lowered the price to $50,000. As mentioned earlier, this interview took place at DeStefano’s other daughter’s dance studio, and while DeStefano kept the man on the phone, others around him tried to reach the authorities.
Someone at the studio called DeStefano’s wife to describe the situation, and for only minutes, the 15-year-old girl was found playing in her room. So what happened? The scammers created a highly realistic scenario using AI-based tools to imitate the voice of DeStefano’s daughter. On the other hand, DeStefano’s statements show the extent to which these technologies have come: “It was all his voice. It was his tone. It was the way he cried. I didn’t doubt for a second that it was him. That was the strange part that really struck me.”Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor specializing in artificial intelligence at Arizona State University, said that voice cloning technology is developing rapidly and people “can no longer trust their ears.” However, with the latest advances in artificial intelligence, a sample of just 3 seconds is all it takes to successfully clone an individual’s voice to capture all intonation, emotion and tempo.
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