The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence
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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.
[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.
TFA also mentions that by routing calls through older non-IP networks you lose the accurate information, although it sounds like the FCC is slowly cracking down on this.
Type A attestation is, generally, solved. Carrier A attests that the number is one of theirs, and they know that the caller is one of theirs too and attached to their network.
However: this is a fraction of calls. Carriers also sell blocks of phone numbers without the corresponding access network. This is what allows you to pick, say, a Twilio number with a local area code. In these cases the best that can be hoped for is a lesser attestation.
But it gets worse, because the operator can also sell blocks of numbers to people with no direct connection to the US carriers and who need to spoof US numbers. That call from Capital One comes from the Philippines via two or three intermediate operators, none of whom can attest to much of anything. And into that gap ride the spammers.
Furthermore, in an Experian-like twist, some carriers also realized that businesses would pay to have their calls show up as "trusted" on the recipient's phone. So the standards were enhanced to deliver 'rich call data'. However, in order to be something worth paying for you also need a baseline of calls that do not have that premium look. A scam? You decide.
Finally, one other misaligned incentive. All of this needs VoIP. Not TDM (classic legacy telephony). However, the big US carriers make bank selling TDM circuits to the hundreds of small regional telcos, and refuse to sell them SIP trunks, because it's s such an easy money maker. So again, technology loses to incentives. These incentives, to make money from phone numbers, vastly outpace what
Thanks for the inside perspective.
Everything is built to address that weakness - think DKIM, SPF, etc, plus STIR/SHAKEN, to say nothing of IP or ASN filtering, but they feel like bandaids on a very difficult problem. What you end up with are basically default-deny except for a personally curated trust set ("only accept calls from my contacts", "everything goes in spam unless I have previously corresponded with the sender"), etc.
One last robocall story. AT&T sat on their hands for years until consumer groups embarrassed the then-CEO enough to do something about it. There was a memorable interview in the Dallas Morning News where they called him on it instead of lobbing him softballs and I suspect that the embarrassment finally got through.
The global community is very low trust, unfortunately. That might be an unfixable problem
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.
>> 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.
Declaring someone mentally unfit is anything but objective and it’s very ripe for abuse.
Often but not always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_of_minors
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.
Somewhere between 70 and 80
> 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.
Likewise, there are 14-year-olds and 16-year-olds smarter and more mature than most adults. Loss of rights doesn't mean they can't contribute, have others deny opportunities or abuse them; people would still look out for them, they would have more protection than children in this regard. Mainly, it makes it easier and more common to control finances, prevent from driving, and prevent from rotting in front of the TV old people who have lost their senses.
I'm 70 by the way. If I want to plan for this I can set up a power of attorney.
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?
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.
I hope they got the message.
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)
"Before you send anything to anyone, ever, call them back. Doesn't matter if it's me, the bank, a lawyer, whatever... tell them 'hang on I have another call coming in, let me just call you back in a few minutes, okay?'"
This is a very useful precaution for banks, and for or calls that come from a family member's real phone number.
But scammers will just open with "I'm in trouble and my phone died" or "I'm in jail calling from a pay phone" and calling back won't do anything to help with that.
Also, given at least in America, our cell phone providers STILL haven't fully blocked caller ID spoofing (last I checked, they just add some tiny icon in the rare case that the CID is trustable, and I'd bet 99.9% of people don't even know that exists!) they can spoof the initial call as your number and many targets will probably mistakenly think the CID match is good enough to just skip it, especially in this "very urgent situation" with you being held at knifepoint by the corrupt third-world cops or whatever.
Not any old random number they give you.
If you're going to get people to call you back, it has the problem of ensuring that they call you back on your real number - giving reasons why they have to call you back on some other number is way too easy ("I've lost my phone", "my phone is at home", and so on)
I consider myself always to be wary of scams and my trust-level is zero when they call me, but I recently almost got myself hooked on an airline support call. I google searched the support number and trusted the AI summary on top and called it, they asked me my reservation number and I happily provided. With the reservation number they have public access to the entire reservation details, they knew my name, my flight, my co-passenger details everything. I called to do a reservation for my pet which is normally not done online. their problem, they got greedy and asked me more than pet travel, iirc they said there was a problem with one of my flights, it wasn't paid and I had to repay on the call. If they just followed along instead of going by the script I would have paid the pet travel amount.
Oh yeah! Neat.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230620135556/http://bash.org/?...
proof of pudding: *******
People aren't prepared for this shit.
I have them both set at about €150.
I think for the bank I can go to a branch to avoid the limit, but that will be with the full fraud suspicion of the teller.
I used to have a residential mortgage with two other people and my name was stuffed into some ancillary field as a co-holder and they refused to give me any information or transact over the phone. I eventually figured out I needed to tell them to look in some extended info field, and the whole endeavor was annoying but ultimately I was appreciative of the strictness (that the entire mortgage data model—at the time (25 years ago), I don't know what it's like today—seems to assume that it will only ever be two people of opposite gender who are married will be on a mortgage was much more disappointing. The other two people were assumed to be married and the woman was seemingly by default listed as the non-primary).
"Hi Firebeyond, we're doing a background check. Can you confirm the following info you entered into our portal?" then proceeds to list full SSN, drivers license, DOB, etc., etc., etc.
"... and can you also confirm that this is the correct email address we have on file?"
All the while they had reached out by FB Messenger to my partner (not that she was in any of the info I submitted, and this was just a standard BG check, not a security clearance) to ask her if she knew me...
Luckily, my new employer was as horrified as I was, apologized profusely, and fired the background check company.
> 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.
“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.”
(sarcastic rant over)
Most of the benefits of AI are being overshadowed by the lack of regulation and reckless abandon at which they are being developed.
Given the current trajectory I don't know if that's going to change before it's too late.
If you think it is boosting productivity a lot that's fine. Just realize that it is probably enabling even more harm than that
Although in this case, perhaps it's more like... throughput, capacity, or parallelism.
We're staying away from the trust funds and shame though.
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.
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"
Talking on the phone is now an unmitigated liability.
They can probably ignore international calls, although only probably.
Mostly ignore unknown numbers, but if I'm expecting a call, I will pick up.
One feature that's conspicuously missing from many of these is "unknown call block" or equivalent.
Which is completely staggering to me.
I'm looking at other options, including VOIP / SIP Trunking, where it should in theory be possible to incorporate any arbitrarily complex call-screening feature(s), though Further Research is Needed.
Android / iOS phones typically have several available options for call screening. Unfortunately they include numerous other issues and negatives.
Sigh.
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.
I like most am deeply unsatisfied with the archaic system though of a basically unchangeable 10-digit number granting permission for anyone to fill up my phone with messages and interrupt me with calls, and hate that I have to ever answer calls from a number I don't know.
I really would like a mutual opt-in system, where you have to pre-establish consent before it's even possible to message or call you, but it seems impossible to get there from here. We can't even get the stupid cell phone companies to strongly enforce that caller ID isn't spoofed!
How often have you met people over the phone in the past decade?
I will say that blocking all unrecognized numbers, though, is an unworkable idea. Any parent or caregiver knows that they need to be able to occasionally receive calls from a number they've never heard of before.
Phone calls and SMS should be like that, which, they almost could be today just with the phone OS keeping track of who you've previously "accepted."[1]
Except.
The identifiers (phone numbers) are nearly infinite, and nearly free, so the scammers just use a "new to you" number every time they call you, allowing each one to generate a new 'invitation.'
And of course to make it worse, the "numbers" are actually truly free since they can spoof any number they want all day long and to this day, most of those calls will go through and not even show a big red flag.
That last part is entirely reprehensible that our carriers haven't solved it by now, but apparently they don't want to.
[1] and also there's that sticky problem that some arbitrary company like say, a health insurance company or the state government, has 1000 departments who might call you, and they couldn't give you a full list if they wanted to.
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?”
If an expert can't distinguish, it has absolutely nothing to do with being "stupid" or not. So send them that, maybe.
If they are still stubborn about it, then thank them for contributing to the future funding of Scam the World With AI.
Not a bad idea, but not a brick wall.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(chatbot)
[1] https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/o2-unveils-daisy-the-ai-gra...
> 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.
> 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.
>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.)
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.
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.
We’re not disagreeing? That’s basically what I said: The AI wrote the article. Saying it drafted the article is a way of admitting it was written by AI but making it sound like it was actually a journalistic endeavor.
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!
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-...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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...
Eh, maybe.
Some of those may be hospice-style scenarios, where starvation is technically the cause of death at times. https://www.ccjm.org/content/ccjom/70/6/548.full.pdf
“Grandma the password is ‘Integra’ but I can just tell you now, it’s not me calling you, it must be a sca—“
“Thanks got it byeeeeee” <scammer calls grandma>
The procedure is:
1. Kid tells password to parent in person. 2. From then on: when kid calls parent, if kid requests anything sensitive, parent ask for the password, and kid must provide it. 3. Password is never mentioned over the phone in any other situation.
How would anyone be able to extract the password from the kid?
"Oh my gosh Dad/Son! You know we have a password for that!"
"Yes -- actually, use it now so WE BOTH KNOW YOU'RE NOT A SCAM!"
"Sure, Dad/Son! It's DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER!"
"Thanks!"
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..."
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).
There's a reason scammers rely heavily on things like gift cards, it's because hiring mules is expensive and creates a trail police can follow back to the scammers. It requires them to be in the same locale as the person they are scamming. Mailing cash is also pretty dicey for the scammers because you have to send the mail to a valid address. That becomes something police can trace.
If you wanted to completely eliminate scams then yeah, you'd also outlaw 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.
That's the primary reason why so many scammers target old people. It's less to do with education and more to do with the fact that as people age they become naturally more trusting.
These scumbags send grandma to a Bitcoin ATM.
A while ago, some police department simply seized them and the cash inside and reimbursed victims with the proceeds thereof.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4uKSvFU40
Kitboga is a dang hero.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
This doesn’t make any sense. At some point they will speak to their child and learn that the call wasn’t real.
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
Another pillar of basic trust that's being eroded on an industrial scale. Sigh.
and receiving more.
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.
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.
Fun.
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.
Quick note: you mean “wary” instead of “weary” there.
This is a good reminder that we should review that, since its been 10 years or so.
...hoping it is not on Tommy's instagram?
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.
So... This has to be a Sneakers reference, right?
Kinda crazy
...but I know one of the signals they use for authentication is voice analysis in background...which I do not love.
Not end of world - it’s not the primary Auth means but still not ideal.
(never heard of anyone actually using that in real life, sounds uttery insane)
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.
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.
That should have been a red flag.
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).
Also, one's likeness (like face image) should also be protected from being used by anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassy_Justice
https://www.youtube.com/@SassyJustice/videos
Full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM
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.
It should be illegal to "impersonate" a human voice.
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.
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...
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.
The federal government.
Now in the era of AI, this means anyone in the vicinity of an officer has a voice sample in the public domain, plus potentially their image.
Complex issue. I like body cams, I like freedom of information laws, but don't love this particular outcome.