It seems like we are learning something new about artificial intelligence (AI) every day and while most of the time AI is being used for good, scammers are finding ways to use it to steal your money.
The FBI recently warned that AI is being used in a growing number of so-called “grandparent scams” right here in San Diego. Although seniors are not the only ones being targeted.
Scammers have been using fear tactics to try and trick you into handing over money for years. Now they are using voice cloning technology, to make those phone calls sound even more real.
You answer a call and on the other end of the line you hear the frantic voice of a loved one. That is exactly what happened to Relli.
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Relli said she heard her dad’s voice say “hello,” but then someone else got on the phone and started making terrifying demands.
“Listen, if you ever want to see your dad again, you are going to listen to me. I have a gun to his head and I am going to blow his brains out right now,” Relli described the terrifying phone call she received.
Panicked, Relli immediately sent $500 through a cash payment app to a phone number the caller gave her. Her boyfriend, who was with her, quickly called her family and confirmed her dad was OK. That's when Relli realized she’d been scammed.
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We don’t know for sure whether Relli's dad’s voice was actually cloned, but University of San Diego cybersecurity professor Nikolas Behar said artificial intelligence is making it easier to do.
“So they'll pull down your voice from social media and then they'll upload it to a website that charges less than $10 to generate a clip of your voice or of that voice based on the input that you give it,” Behar said.
To see how the technology works, we set up an account on the Resemble AI website. NBC 7 and Telemundo 20 Responds reporter Claudia Simones recorded a verbal consent, which was used to capture her voice to be cloned. Once she uploaded it, she typed a sentence for her cloned voice to say.
So what can you do to protect yourself and your loved ones? Behar said don’t upload videos containing your voice to social media. That may be too hard for some of us to resist, and if that’s the case, Behar said you should make your account private so random people can’t access it to clone your voice. And lastly, set up a secret code word with your family members.
“When we get those types of calls, we can say that code word to actually verify that they are who they say they are. And then if they don't know that code word or they don't respond correctly, then you know that something's going on, something's fishy,” Behar said.
Relli says while the $500 she sent to the scammers isn’t a huge financial loss, the emotional toll was overwhelming.
"My dad is OK, but it doesn't take away from the fact that it was so incredibly traumatic and scary," Relli added.
You’ll also want to beware of any phone calls you receive where no one is on the other end. It could be scammers trying to record your voice, not to clone it, but to actually play it back to a family member, before getting on the line and threatening you, like they did Relli.
