Scammers used AI to clone her daughter’s voice and fake a kidnapping. A voice expert says every family now needs a safe word
Source: Fortune ·
A marketing professor who studies voice and persuasion says a familiar voice lowers our defenses. Here’s the simple fix she recommends.
From the source
Artificial intelligence needs as little as three seconds of you speaking to produce a convincing clone of your voice. In tests by cybersecurity firm McAfee, a three-second clip was enough to generate a clone with an 85% match to the original speaker. That technology is increasingly showing up in scams. An estimated 15 million American adults were scammed out of money in 2025, losing roughly $68 billion, according to a survey by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance. The full report says 12% of the scams reported in the survey involved AI or a deepfake. That figure may undercount the problem, since victims don’t always realize AI was used. Scammers can lift voice samples from videos people casually post on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. They then use the clones to convince family members that a loved one is in danger, and talk them out of thousands of dollars in the process. And it’s easy to fall for it. Five hours on the phone Deborah Del Mastro, a mother in Martinez, Calif.,…