'Mom, these bad men have me': She believes scammers cloned her daughter's voice in a fake kidnapping | CNN
www.cnn.com
Jennifer DeStefano's phone rang in January with a terrifying call from her sobbing 15-year-old daughter, saying she'd been kidnapped. But as a relieved DeStefano soon learned, her daughter was safe and the call was a scam.

“A reasonably good clone can be created with under a minute of audio and some are claiming that even a few seconds may be enough.” Mom wary about answering calls for fear voice will be cloned for future virtual kidnapping.

  • quirzle@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    Yes, the article is about a specific instance of it happening.

    I think this might be a case where the generic “scams generally work best if done low effort” doesn’t apply, since to be successful, this sort of scam requires some specifics. The not-kidnapped daughter was away training for a ski race. Blasting “we kidnapped your daughter” to people whose daughter is sitting on the couch next to them or people without daughters doesn’t work at all.

    The article mentions people lose an average of $11k in these scams, which means they’re probably working best when targeting people with some savings.