Scammers Using AI Voice Cloning Awarded Donkey Of The Day

Scammers using AI voice cloning have been awarded Donkey Of The Day.

As life improves in 2023, so will technology.

And with new technology improvements comes new ways that crimes can be committed.

Case in point, today’s Donkey Of The Day comes more from a PSA perspective rather than be focused on a particular person.

A while back, Jennifer DeStefano–of Scottsdale, Arizona–got a call from an unfamiliar phone number.

We’ll let DeStefano tell you what happened next…

“I pick up the phone, and I hear my daughter’s voice, and it says, ‘Mom!’ and she’s sobbing. I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘Mom, I messed up,’ and she’s sobbing and crying.”

Terrifying, ain’t it??? 🤔

Rightfully so.

But but but wait… there’s more!!!

DeStefano continues her statement with “Then I hear a man’s voice say, ‘Put your head back. Lie down,’ and I’m like, ‘Wait, what is going on?’ This man gets on the phone, and he’s like, ‘Listen here. I’ve got your daughter. This is how it’s going to go down. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m going to pop her so full of drugs. I’m going to have my way with her, and I’m going to drop her off in Mexico.’ And at that moment, I just started shaking. In the background, she’s going, ‘Help me, Mom. Please help me. Help me,’ and bawling.”

Yeah, you can tell that she was about to have a heart attack at this point.

But, of course there’s more…

DeStefano adds “It was never a question of who is this? It was completely her voice. It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried. I never doubted for one second it was her. That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core.”

Something like this is usually one of those “calling all cars”-type situations.

But the problem is… none of that mentioned above ever happened 😲

Yep, none of it happened.

Unfortunately for DeStefano, she almost became the victim of an AI voice cloning scam.

Now, how could something like this happen, you ask???

Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University specializing in AI, explains…

“You can no longer trust your ears. In the beginning, it would require a larger amount of samples. Now there are ways in which you can do this with just three seconds of your voice. Three seconds. And with the three seconds, it can come close to how exactly you sound. Most of the voice cloning actually captures the inflection as well as the emotion. The larger the sample, the better off you are in capturing those. Obviously, if you spoke in your normal voice, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to clone how you might sound when you’re upset, but if I also had three seconds of your upset voice, then all bets are off.”

You can give what Charlamagne Tha God had to say on this situation plus drop feedback in the comment box below…