Unfortunately, this story here is more of the ladder.
A new AI voice generator called Voicemod is now being used by scammers to impersonate the voices of friends and relatives to swindle victims out of money
According to reporting from Life Hacker, the technology is now being used to enhance what the Federal Trade Commission categorizes as “imposter scams,” where scammers pretend to be a family member or friend to swindle victims, usually elderly people, out of their money. In 2022, there were over 5,100 reports of imposter scams over the phone, totaling $11 million in losses, according to the Washington Post.
There are services readily available for people to generate voices using AI, such as Voicemod, with very little oversight. Microsoft’s VALL-E text-to-speech AI model claims to be able to simulate anyone’s voice with just three seconds of audio, as reported by Ars Technica.
“It can then re-create the pitch, timber, and individual sounds of a person’s voice to create an overall effect that is similar,” Hany Farid, a professor of digital forensics at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Washington Post. “It requires a short sample of audio, taken from places such as YouTube, podcasts, commercials, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook videos.”
This is incredibly alarming...
There's really not much you can do to avoid this scam besides just being aware of it's existence.
Stay on alert out there, folks.
