SOS call from spouse for money? Having a passphrase can save your life's earnings
India Today
With scammers using AI tech to mimic the voices of partners and family members to swindle life's earnings, a passphrase should be the perfect Valentine's Day gift. This is how a simple pre-decided passphrase can save people from being swindled when it is difficult to tell real voices from AI-generated ones.
"My wife calls me, panicked." The number flashing on podcast host Dustin Burnham's phone was hers. "Babe, our son is hurt. He got in a bike wreck. I'm in the emergency room, but they won't get our insurance. I need cash to get him help. Please send me 3000 dollars as soon as you can. He's really not doing well," Burnham was told.
Burnham, host of The Present Father's Podcast, said he felt immediate fear. But he paused. "Tell me our passphrase and then I'll send the money," he replied.
"What? What passphrase? This is your wife, our son is hurt. Send the money now!!" Burnham was told. He hung up. His wife's number had been spoofed, and the voice, exactly like his wife's, was AI-generated. His son was safe.
What Burnham experienced is part of a worrying and growing global trend. They are widely called AI-voice phishing scams. The way Burnham escaped being scammed by a caller imitating his wife's voice offers an important lesson for others. A simple passphrase, like the one Burnham asked for, could be the vow couples make this Valentine's Day to protect themselves amid the rise of scammers increasingly using AI to impersonate deepfake videos and audios of loved ones.
Here, the scammers used the excuse of an accident. In other cases, they stage a kidnapping. Some even call to claim that a family member has hit a pregnant woman and urgently needs money for legal fees or bail. Some fraudsters go a step further. They use cloned audio along with a few seconds of manipulated video to create an even deadlier panic and extract huge sums of money.
With advances in AI, scammers can now clone a person's voice using just a few seconds of publicly available audio. People's voices in podcasts, social media videos and voice notes from messaging apps provide enough material to create convincing deepfake calls.
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