Our voices are just about as unique as our fingerprints - so how would you feel if your voice was cloned? A new type of deepfake known as voice cloning has emerged in recent months, in which hackers use artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate your voice. Famous faces including Stephen Fry, Sadiq Khan and Joe Biden have all already been victims of voice cloning, while one unnamed CEO was even tricked into transferring 243,000 to a scammer after receiving a fake phone call. But how does it work, and just how convincing is it? To find out, I let a professional hacker clone my voice - with terrifying results.

You can help prevent others from falling victim to the same romance scam and remember if something seems too good to be true. Get ready for this quick heartbreaking story about love gone wrong from a crafty and callous global dating scam artist. CLICK TO GET KURT'S CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, SECURITY ALERTS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER I recently received an email from Linda, who is concerned and wondering if she should worry about falling for a scam from a person she's been talking to online. Here's what she had to say: "I have been in contact with a man who is a Structural Engineer that says he lives and has his office in Wisconsin, but currently is in Dubai overseeing the construction of buildings that he was awarded a contract to build, we talk on the phone all the time and text all the time. He has shared everything that I have asked.

For a long time, financial institutions had a buttoned-down reputation when it came to innovative thinking. Nowadays, even the most conventional and risk-averse parts of the economy are looking at Artificial Intelligence, not long ago considered an experimental, bleeding edge technology. Wall Street is the financial district of New York City. It is the home of the New York Stock Exchange, the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies. Nowhere is the change more dramatic than in Financial Services.

Email me at SteveSlr *at* aol*dot*com (make the obvious substitutions between the asterisks; you don't have to capitalize an email address, I just included the capitals to make clear the logic -- it's my name without a space and without the vowels in "Sailer" that give so many people, especially irate commenters, trouble.) I always appreciate my readers' help, especially monetary. Here's how you can help: First: You can use PayPal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. PayPal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual.

Imagine credit card rewards tailored to your spending, travel options based on your past preferences, text prompts to shift some money over to savings and scans of your spending patterns to block fraudsters from using your card. Card issuers are doing all of this now – with much more in the works – all powered by artificial intelligence. The public faces of these AI-based systems are such as Alexa, Erica (Bank of America), Mezi (American Express) and Watson (IBM). Behind the public faces, these big data systems look at your past behavior, crunch the numbers and reply with personalized suggestions based on your spending and savings goals. Here's how AI is changing credit card rewards and even how you budget and save: "Customize is the key word," says Craig Snodgrass, chief data officer at Cardlytics, which partners with more than 2,000 financial institutions to run their online and mobile banking rewards programs.

Amazon wants to make it easier than ever for users to donate to charity. Users simply ask Alexa, the voice of Amazon Echo smart speakers, to donate money to one of dozens of philanthropic organizations to give to them, Amazon announced on Monday. Among these organizations are the American Cancer Society, March of Dimes Foundation and PETA. 'This is just the beginning -- the list will continue to grow,' an Amazon spokesperson told CNET. When users donate money, it will come out of the bank account linked to the user's Amazon account, Amazon said.

Google made a splash earlier this week with a new Assistant-powered shopping initiative seemingly aimed at chipping away at Amazon's dominance, and now it has a new target in its sights: Venmo. Starting today, you'll be able to use your iPhone or Android phone to send money to anyone in your contact list just by asking Google Assistant. Like the Google Express shopping service, you'll need to have Google Pay installed and set up, but once you go through the process--either through the app or by following Assistant's guided setup--you'll be able to send any amount of money just by saying, "OK Google, send Brad $100 for dinner." Google also says the service will be coming to Google Home and other Assistant-powered speakers in the coming months. But it still could be a while.

Amazon's Alexa can order you an Uber, tell you where you've parked your car and turn off your lights. But pretty soon, the voice assistant could be getting one of its most useful skills yet. Biometric software company Daon has developed a way for users to send money to friends using Alexa, according to CNET. The feature could arrive on the internet giant's voice-activated speakers and devices in the next nine to 18 months. Amazon's Alexa voice assistant could allow people to pay friends using their voice in the next nine months or by next year, according to CNET Daon is the company behind MasterCard's'Selfie Pay,' which lets users send an online payment by showing their face to their smartphone's camera.

Time for Venmo, Square Cash, and PayPal to play defense? Apple on Tuesday is set to finally launch its previously announced person-to-person payments service that will let you pay the babysitter, split dinner costs with pals, pay your share of rent to a roommate, or reimburse the kid who cuts you lawn, all through the Messages app on your iPhone or iPad. The service, which is still in beta, also will work with the Apple Watch. Siri promises to lend an assist too, if you bark out a command along the lines of,"Hey Siri, send $25 to Sam for movie tickets." Before you send money through the service, you must securely authenticate the transaction, through Face ID facial recognition on the iPhone X, or the Touch ID fingerprint sensor on other iPhones.

Back in 2015, Facebook introduced the ability to send money to friends through Messenger and now it has brought that capability to UK users. It's the first time Facebook has launched the feature outside of the US. A number of companies have begun working peer-to-peer payment abilities into their services. Skype lets users in nearly two dozen countries send cash within its mobile app via PayPal and PayPal has a bot that let's you send money within Slack. In May, the encrypted messaging app Telegram began supporting payments through chatbots, as did Facebook last year.