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The most common fraud in the U.S. over the past year was the impostor scam. More than 856,000 instances, collectively draining $2.7 billion nationwide, were reported to the Federal Trade Commission in 2023. First, swindlers fake familiarity or authority—maybe by stealing the identity of a friend or relative or claiming to be a bank representative or a federal agent. Then, in that guise, they call, text or e-mail you and attempt to take your money.
And now artificial intelligence has larded these scams with an additional layer of duplicity: inexpensive voice-cloning services that an impersonator can easily abuse to make deceptive—and astonishingly convincing—phone calls in another person’s voice. These AI tools digest speech samples (perhaps snatched from videos posted online or from a supposedly “wrong number” phone call) and generate audio replicas of the stolen voice that can be manipulated to say basically anything.
If there were a golden rule to thwart AI-infused phone scams, it might be something like this: Online or on the phone, treat your family members and friends as though they were an e-mail log-in page. Make up a passcode—a safe word or private phrase—and share it with them in person. Memorize it. If they call you in alarm or under unusual pressure, especially if those concerns are connected to requests for money, ask for the code to verify who is on the other end of the line.
Adopting a computerlike countermeasure for a problem enabled by computer algorithms is admittedly an unnatural practice. It is a human impulse to trust a family member’s voice, said Jennifer DeStefano, a target of an attempted scam, to a Senate judiciary subcommittee last June. Perpetrators had called her phone, claimed her then 15-year-old daughter was kidnapped and demanded a ransom. The plot fell apart when DeStefano learned her child was safe on a ski trip—but only after DeStefano had at first been thoroughly deceived by an AI mimic of her daughter’s voice. “How many times has a loved one reached out to you in despair and you stopped them to validate their identity?” she wrote in her testimony. “The answer is, more than likely, never.”
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