a A friend of mine was recently fooled by a fraudulent email purporting to be from her middle school daughter and transferred £100 into her account to cover a mysterious situation, which she described as a very time-sensitive and inconvenient event. That’s it.
You can imagine how the scammers managed to pull it off. Remember the everyday low-level anxiety of parents expecting bad news when their children are further away than the kitchen table? What’s more, the bad news story, which begins with a 19-year-old’s email saying, “I broke my phone,” is completely believable. All the scammer has to do is lean back.
Still, the story isn’t complete, as it neglects to ask basic questions like, “But if your phone is broken, why transfer money to someone else’s bank account?” , and for years afterward we called him a fool. He didn’t even call her number to see if he could talk to her. A 100-pound lighter was probably the best place to land. If someone tries to release his life savings, he will concentrate.
But what happens when you hear your child begging for money just like you? Who has strong enough defenses to withstand voice cloning? Members of Stop Scams UK tried to explain this to me last year. Scammers can extract the child’s voice from her TikTok account. Then all they have to do is find the parent’s phone number. I thought I had gotten the wrong end of the stick and had to piece together the message from recorded words available on social media. Good luck getting some soccer tips and some believable havoc from K-Pop, I thought. When it comes to AI, he didn’t think for 10 seconds about whether it could infer speech patterns from samples. In fact, it’s possible.
I think it’s still pretty easy to get around. Kid Machine is seeking urgent assistance. You say, “Precious and perfect being, I love you with all my heart.” Kid Machine will surely reply, “I love you too.” Why can’t we do that? A real child would claim to have been sick in the mouth. You can’t build an algorithm for this.
Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian
Source: www.theguardian.com
