Are we sure it's AI?
I've heard of this scam happening maybe a decade ago with my extended family. The voice was a real person overseas with a lot of exp tricking grandparents. Scammers only had basic information.
They act as a freaked out kid and the victim gets roped in. They scam for thousands of dollars each time, even succeeding a few times a day would net a big profit. Also cell connections are low fidelity, I bet that aids their ability to trick the victim.
Yeah this happened to my grandparents, they just say “I sound like shit because I’ve been crying”
Same. Years ago my grandfather received a call from a guy claiming to be my younger, male cousin saying he was in jail for something and needed bail. Luckily (?), my grandfather was an asshole and told him to call his mother.
Not sure I buy this tbh.
I don't know, the "Spanish prisoner" is a scam that seems to be reinvented every few years every time we see a little bit of a change in technology. It wouldn't take much to fake a person's voice with a trained model, especially if that person has an online profile open to the public where they post content in their own voice.
The Spanish Prisoner is also an excellent David Mamet film.
A: The Spanish Prisoner is also an excellent...
B: ...excellent
A: David... David Mamet.
B: What I'm saying is, when it comes to excellent films
A: That's what I'm saying
B: (simultaneously) David Mamet
A: (simultaneously) Mamet
B: it's excellent
A: hm. The best.
The plot of the movie is very similar to the basic setup of a 419 scam, which was given the nickname "the Spanish prisoner"
I'm going to go ahead and check that out tonight. Looks like it has a great cast.
Yeah, it has some sus vibes. I'm usually far too trusting, but here even my bullshit detectors rang
I could easily conceive some tricks to get clips of a person’s voice without them realizing. I’d write them out but… that would be stupid of me. Humans have more vulnerabilities than computers.
Yeah, unless this person runs a YouTube or podcast it seems implausible. What would you train a random AI on for the normal person?
I could see a situation where you hack a phone, get the contacts and call history, pick the 1st or 2nd most dialed number, have a bot call that person to get samples, then go back to the original phone and try this... I mean, eventually you'd get a hit?
The only way to train an AI voice model is to have lots of samples. As scummy as they are, neither Microsoft nor Apple is selling your voice recordings with enough info to link them to you specifically. This person probably just forgot about an old social post where they talk for enough time for a model to be trained. Still super scary stuff.
Not true anymore. You can create a reasonable voice clone with like 30 seconds of audio now (11labs for example doesn't do any kind of authentication). The results are good enough for this kind of thing, especially in a lower bandwidth situation like a phone call.
This person probably just forgot about an old social post…
Or recordings made during customer service calls, maybe a disgruntled employee decides to repurpose the data.
True for creating voices at all, but that work has already been done.
Now we're just taking these large AI's trained to mimic voices and giving them a 30 second audio clip to tell them what to mimic. It can be done quickly and give convincing results especially when hidden by the phonecall quality.
When I was a kid, my parents had "the talk" with me. It was about sex. Now I'm older and my parents are too. I have to have "the talk" with them. It's about scams.
My uncle got divorced a few years back and it nearly crushed him. He we a ridiculously handsome young and successful man, so women chased him. At any point when he was younger he had at least a handful of women actively pursuing him. Now he was older and divorced. Those women were long gone, all having married and carried on with their lives. He didn’t expect to struggle with dating like he did and that made the whole thing even harder.
I set him up on all of the big dating sites. I didn’t know how bad it was, I’d never used them.
He was talking to at least 10 scammers a day, probably more.
He’s kind of a miser so no one was going to get any of his money, but his hobbies showed his wealth and oh boy did they try.
It was so bad that he gave up on the dating sites entirely. He’s had a few girlfriends since then but he only met one person in over a year on the dating sites.
It blows my mind just how many people are out there making a living scamming people.
The sad thing is that, in the current era, virtually all dating sites are scams riddled with bots and have been for over a decade. Their goal is to make money not produce matches.
He really struggled with it.
I’d do a reverse image search and find the actual person, he’d thank me and move on. Some of them got in his head. One even faked a Skype call with a video of a beautiful woman and somehow scouted his Facebook profile to really dive deep into his personality. The video was like 13 pixels and she’d say, “I’m sorry, I live way out in the wilderness and we have bad satellite internet.”
He said, “She’s too good to be true. No one is this agreeable.” I told him to ask her to make a specific gesture because of all of scammers. He did, he asked her to hold her hands above her head in the shape of a triangle. She refused, said something like, “I can’t believe you don’t trust me. That breaks my heart. You know me.” She stopped talking to him, a couple weeks later she messaged, “I’m so sorry, my mom is in the hospital and I have no money to eat. I wouldn’t ask you but I have been alone so long you’re all I know.” He told her if it was that desperate she could prove who she is and he’d help. Nope. Nothing. Radio silence. That one really hurt him. Whoever it was played the scam game real good.
You might not believe this, but I have a cousin (my mom’s first cousin actually) who fell in love with her scammer. He conned her out of thousands of dollars, turned out to be from Nigeria when he said he was from somewhere else. About 6 months in he said, “Listen. I am not who I have said I am. My real name is John, I am truly in love with you. I know you and I want you to really know me.”
She was in her 50s, he was in his 30s. She was not an attractive woman. She was short, fat, walked with a limp and was born with physical deformities (her nickname to us kids was “old bat”, playfully of course). He wasn’t attractive either, but still. 20 years younger, from another country, had, I don’t know, scammed her. My mom tried her best to stop it, but she flew to Nigeria and married the dude. She stayed over there a few months and then he flew back with her. He stayed with her about 4 years I guess, and he ran around with any woman who would have him. He finally drained her money and rolled out.
The last thing I heard about him, he was arrested for breaking into the grocery store he worked at and robbing the safe.
It is crazy to me just how much money can motivate people to do absurd and crazy things. I can’t relate at all. I’ve been broke as shit and all I had to do was sell a few things to get back on track and I couldn’t motivate myself to even do that. Money just doesn’t mean enough to me to go to any trouble to get it haha.
All those TV shows that taught us how to spot which twin was the evil one by asking about life history were just training us to beat AI
Given the sheer scale of data collection now, i doubt even that will protect us into the future
Voicemail greeting.
I dont have one. The automated message is just reading my number and telling you to leave a message.
People still set that?
My voicemail is just me going "BRRRRRRRKZM" or some sort of screaming distorted gibberish
you don't even need to fake a voice for these scams tho, it's very difficult to differentiate q voice while you're crying
Do a lot of people put their voice on the internet "as much as they're able to"? It sounds like that person may post their voice online more than the average person...
Discord just automatically started putting you opt in for having your voice recorded for clips
If you post videos of yourself online, your voice will be caught. Whether social media or public presence as a streamer. I’m pretty sure that’s all they meant.
I imagine even discounting social media self-posts, there are VoIP calls, etc.
Don't assume a call with your mom through Facebook Messenger or Zoom or FaceTime or whatever is not somehow packaged and sold.
Waiting for the comment that's going to say something like, "Joke's on you, my parents don't even talk to me."
My parents probably do not talk to you either.
Mine can't stand them.
My grandmother got a call from scammers pretending to be me. They didn't use my name, but I was the only adult granddaughter at the time lol. Anyway, the scammers said that they needed money for hospital bills and a bus ticket home. They said they got into a fight at a friend's funeral in New Jersey and had to go to the hospital. And then after that their car got stolen. My grandmother knew that I was not in New Jersey, and told the scammers that she'd call them back once she got to the bank. She then informed my parents, who told me. It was hilarious.
Seriously, it was only one person, and it was with a golf cart.
I advise everyone to contact their loved ones and inform them of this possibility. I also advise having some codeword that would be used if there was an emergency and money needs to be sent.
For example is more than $100 is being asked for we have to share the code word or we should not transfer money.
The code word is Donkeyballs
Pashang.
Hey is me, your cousin. I'm kinda in a jam and need your help. The contractor cut me a huge check after the fire that took everything but the bank won't cash it without proof. I just need $101 for proof and I can pay back immediately.
This is for real.
Thanks.
Donkeyballs
Tbh it’s not that hard to stop scams. Treat EVERY call you get as a scammer!
Either phone back on a known number, not some shit they give you or if they claim you need bail, ask for a reference number and the place being held and phone them after looking up the number, and If they get pissed, it’s a scam!
No real police force is going to care/shouldn’t care if you call back. It’s not like cops get a percentage of bail money but scammers always seem too desperate to get you to pay and lose it pretty quick.
What kind of bill are you going to pay for killing 2 people tho
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
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