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Summary
It’s late at night.
Money needs to be wired to you immediately so you could get home.
The voice in the message sounds so real and is unmistakably that of their childonly it isn’t.
Linaimages/Shutterstock
How Does an AI Voice Cloning Scam Work?
Voice cloning can create incredibly realistic digital replicas of a person’s voice.
And for reference, here’s is how Christian Cawley really sounds, talking on The Really Useful Podcast.
To create an AI voice clone, only a small voice sample is requiredoften only a minute or less.
This can be a hospitalization, arrest, theft, kidnappinganything that creates fear.
Scammers are relying on you to panic and become emotional, as this increases your vulnerability to their tactics.
Do not share any information, and do not engage with scammers.
Instead, call your loved one back on a known number to confirm the authenticity of the distress call.
Conversing further with the scammers can risk having your voice recorded and cloned as well.
These AI speech classifiers work just like AI writing detectors.
Simply input the audio file, and the classifier will mark it as human or AI-generated.
A great tool for performing this check is the ElevenLabs speech classifier.
In the next example, the same distressing message was produced with an AI voice cloning tool.
To the human ear, the voices are indistinguishable.
The tool, however, has marked it as having a 98% probability of being AI-generated.
You should also contact your loved one on a known number to confirm.
Establish an offline password only known to loved ones with your family and friends.
