It's Time to Protect Yourself From AI Voice Scams

This month, a local TV-news station in Arizona ran an unsettling report: A mother named Jennifer DeStefano says that she picked up the phone to the sound of her 15-year-old crying out for her, and was asked to pay a $1 million ransom for her daughter's return. In reality, the teen had not been kidnapped, and was safe; DeStefano believes someone used AI to create a replica of her daughter's voice to deploy against her family. "It was completely her voice," she said in one interview. It was the way she would have cried." DeStefano's story has since been picked up by other outlets, while similar stories of AI voice scams have surfaced on TikTok and been reported by The Washington Post.