Police believe AI voice cloning used to scam seniors

[you&me]

Originally Posted by fotze2

My dad seems to be a magnet for these. He's 93.

First one was some computer virus expert that my folks had employed years earlier. I shudder to think how much they had paid these C%^ts over the years to prevent "computer viruses". Smoke like a chimney your whole life and succumb to it but holy crap, viruses are what we really need to be scared of. He couldn't wrap his head around how mind boggling stupid it was to pay a guy to stop viruses by letting the guy into his online bank account.

I came into the house and he was on the phone with the guy with his bank open and the guy had remote control of his computer. So I actually talked to the piece of crap. I said some evil things to the guy. We had to eventually change his phone number.

We went to the bank (BMO) so we could put up some controls on his account (with his approval) and they couldn't be more useless. He kept getting suckered.

The pretending to be a relative in jail one got him too, but the cashier at Walmart where he was buying gift cards actually caught it and questioned him, not the useless tit at BMO we had talked to two weeks earlier.

That's really sad. I mean no offence by this, but do you think your dad ended up on some sort of 'soft target' list? Or is it simply bad luck?

My mom fell for the computer virus one too and I felt bad because she "didn't want to bother me with that stuff". Fortunately that's the only one that we're aware of, but I'll definitely have to have a talk with them (look how the tables have turned) about this voice cloning.

[Mathgod]

Here are some examples of AI voice cloning. It's much more advanced than traditional voice manipulation methods.

[psyang]

Originally Posted by getbak

There are many ways to clone a voice. That's not really the issue.

The issue is that a clone of a specific person's voice is only useful against a specific limited number of targets. If I have a clone of Billy's voice, that might increase my chances of scamming Billy's Grandma, but it's not going to help me scam Bobby's Grandpa.

It's much easier to just use a generic voicebot that can be used against thousands of potential targets, rather than going to the trouble of creating something so heavily targeted against a handful of people.

Agreed. Our brain will often make our assumptions fit the data.

Reminds me of the memoirs of a Romanian pastor I read. He was imprisoned under the communists after world war 2 and he describes several techniques they employed (including torture and brainwashing) to get names of "insurgents" against the regime. Here's a quote:

Once I awoke to see the cell door ajar. Soft music sounded in the corridor - or was it an illusion? Then the sound became distorted and a woman's voice was sobbing. She began to scream. It was my wife!

"No, no! Please don't beat me. Not again! I can't bear it!"

There was the sound of a whip hitting flesh. The screams rose to an appalling pitch. Every muscle in my body was strained in a rictus of horror. Slowly the voice began to die away, moaning; but now it was the voice of a stranger. It faded into silence. I was left drained of feeling, trembling and drenched with sweat. Later I learned that it was a tape recording, but every prisoner who heard it thought that the victim was his wife or sweetheart.