It's a classic and common scam, and like many scams it relies on a scary, urgent scenario to override the victim's common sense and make them more likely to send money.
There's an easy and old-school trick you can use to preempt the scammers: creating a shared verbal password with your family.
The ability to create audio deepfakes of people's voices using machine learning and just minutes of them speaking has become relatively cheap and easy to acquire technology.
There are myriad websites that will let you make voice clones.
Some will let you use a variety of celebrity voices to say anything they want, while others will let you upload a new person's voice to create a voice clone of anyone you have a recording of.
Scammers have figured out that they can use this to clone the voices of regular people.
Suddenly your relative isn't talking to someone who sounds like a complete stranger, they are hearing your own voice.
Voice generation scams aren't widespread yet, but they do seem to be happening.
There have been news stories and even congressional testimony from people who have been the targets of voice impersonation scams.
Voice cloning scams are also being used in political disinformation campaigns as well.
It's impossible for us to know what kind of technology these scammers used, or if they're just really good impersonations.
It is likely that the scams will grow more prevalent as the technology gets cheaper and more ubiquitous.
For now, the novelty of these scams, and the use of machine learning and deepfakes, technologies which are raising concerns across many sectors of society, seems to be driving a lot of the coverage.
The family password is a decades-old, low tech solution to this modern high tech problem.
The first step is to agree with your family on a password you can all remember and use.
You could use the name of a well known person or object in your family, an inside joke, a family meme, or any word that you can all remember easily.
Any group of people with which you associate can benefit from having a password.
It's not likely that the scammer will break into your house to find the family password.
Many scams of this nature rely on panic and keeping you in your lower brain, by asking for the passphrase you can also take a minute to think.
Go make a family password and a friend password to keep your family and friends from getting scammed by AI impostors.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Thu, 01 Feb 2024 01:13:03 +0000