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A mom in Arizona is sending a warning after her daughter’s voice was cloned in a $1 million kidnapping scam.
Jennifer DeStefano’s 15-year-old daughter Briana was on a ski vacation when DeStefanogot a call from an unknown number,the mother toldGood Morning America. The only reason she answered was because she thought something could have happened to Briana.
After picking up, DeStefano said she heard, “my daughter’s voice crying and sobbing, saying, ‘Mom.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, what happened?’ She’s like, ‘Mom, these bad men have me. Help me, help me.’ "
She told NBC 15 thata man then got on the phoneand told her, “Put your head back, lie down,” which terrified DeStefano.
“This man gets on the phone and he’s like, ‘Listen here. I’ve got your daughter. This is how it’s going to go down. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m going to pop her so full of drugs. I’m going to have my way with her and I’m going to drop her off in Mexico,'” DeStefano said. “And at that moment, I just started shaking. In the background, she’s going, ‘Help me, Mom. Please help me. Help me,’ and bawling.”
He demanded $1 million before lowering it to $50,000 after DeStefano, who was at a dance studio with another daughter, told him she didn’t have it, per NBC 15. She had the mysterious man keep talking while one mom at the studio called the police and another got DeStefano’s husband on the phone. They were able to make sure that Briana was safe in less than five minutes.
“She was upstairs in her room going, ‘What? What’s going on?'” DeStefano said of her teenager’s reaction. “Then I get angry, obviously, with these guys. This is not something you play around with.”
She hung up the phone and told NBC 15 that she truly believed it was her daughter on the phone, instead of an artificial intelligence (AI) platform.
“It was completely her voice. It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried,” said DeStefano. “I never doubted for one second it was her. That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core.”
Briana toldGood Morning America, “I started to wonder, like, if these people were asking to track my mom and pick her up, they could have obviously been putting some information together to try and track me or some of my siblings to actually make this a reality. So it definitely scared me.”
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The founder of Waye, whicheducates youth on technologyper its website, toldGMAthat getting someone’s voice is easier than most might think.
“Most people in the modern age have some form of an online identity and have probably spoken in some way, in some aspect that’s been recorded, especially if you’re under the age of 25,” Sinéad Bovell said. “So this becomes very, very challenging as we move into a future where we do have these AI generators or synthetic audio when it comes to verification and validation.”
He added, “There’s a lot of positive and exciting aspects about these technologies. But then of course, they also come with a lot of risks and harms.”
Experts advise social media users to have private pages and watch out for unknown numbers in an effort to prevent situations like DeStefano and Briana’s.
“Just think of the movies. Slow it down. Slow the person down. Ask a bunch of questions,” he added. “If they have someone of interest to you, you’re going to know a lot of details about them that this scam artist isn’t going to know. You start asking questions about who it is and different details of their background that are not publicly available, you’re going to find out real quick that it’s a scam artist.”
source: people.com
