Your mom called. It wasn't your mom.
AI voice cloning scams affect one in four people, with victims losing up to $15,000
One in four people have now encountered an AI voice cloning scam. Not a phishing email. Not a suspicious link. A phone call that sounds exactly like someone they love, asking for money.
The setup is almost too simple: scammers need as little as three seconds of audio, feed it to a voice cloning tool, and suddenly your grandmother is getting a call from "you" saying there's been a car accident and she needs to wire money immediately before anyone goes to jail. One Florida woman lost $15,000 that way.
The thing that makes this land differently than other scams is that it works on the people who would never fall for a regular scam. The ones who know better. The ones who taught you not to click weird links. Because it's not a link. It's a voice. It's the specific cadence of someone you've been listening to your entire life.
We taught everyone to be suspicious of strangers on the internet. Nobody taught anyone to be suspicious of their own kid's voice.