A scammer reportedly used AI to clone a girl’s voice in an attempt to get money from her mother. The scammer pretended that he had kidnapped the 15-year-old using fake audio, Arizona’s Family reported.
Jennifer DeStefano from Scottsdale, Arizona told Arizona’s Family– a local news station affiliated with CBS – that she noticed her phone ringing and it was a call that popped up as unknown. When she answered it, she claims she could hear her 15-year-old daughter crying and sobbing saying things like, “mom, I messed up.” She said she didn’t think twice about it because the voice sounded just like her daughter and she was also out of town on a ski trip.
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DeStefano said that a man’s voice then got on the phone, demanding her daughter to put her head back and lie down. “Listen here, I’ve got your daughter,” the scammer reportedly said. In the background, she says she could hear her daughter pleading for her help. “The voice 100% belonged to my daughter,” she told the local news site. “It was completely her voice. It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried. I never doubted for one second it was her,” she added.
DeStefano said she was asked for money. First, the scammer started with $1 million, then, after she said she didn’t have that much money, it was lowered to $50,000.
In a Facebook post in January detailing the call, DeStefano said: “The kidnapper was demanding $50k in cash and was arranging how he was going to pick me up with the money and bag my head … I was warned I better have the money or we would both be dead,” she said.
Insider reached out to DeStefano on Facebook but did not immediately hear back.
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At the time, DeStefano was on her way to her other daughter’s dance studio. One of the other moms there called DeStefano’s husband, who said that their 15-year-old daughter was actually safe and with him, DeStefano wrote on Facebook.
WHAT IS A.I?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. AI systems can be trained using large amounts of data and algorithms that enable them to learn and improve over time. Some of the key technologies that underpin AI include machine learning, natural language processi
ng, computer vision, robotics, and expert systems. AI has many potential applications across various fields, including healthcare, finance, transportation, and entertainment.