<
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/worried-about-ai-voice-clone-scams-create-family-password>
"Your grandfather receives a call late at night from a person pretending to be
you. The caller says that you are in jail or have been kidnapped and that they
need money urgently to get you out of trouble. Perhaps they then bring on a
fake police officer or kidnapper to heighten the tension. The money, of course,
should be wired right away to an unfamiliar account at an unfamiliar bank.
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. Now, scammers are reportedly experimenting with a way to further
heighten that panic by playing a simulated recording of “your” voice.
Fortunately, 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. This makes the scam much more concerning.
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. But 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."
Via Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
