AI voice cloning is simple and easily accomplished at little cost.  Scammers clone voices of people they are targeting with a variety of scams including the grandparent or family emergency scam where the family member gets a phone call from someone posing as a family member dealing with an emergency needing immediate funds.  This scam was bad enough in the past, but now with voice cloning technology, the voice you hear sounds exactly the same as the voice of the real person.  Voice cloning  is also used in fake kidnapping scams and even cloning someone’s voice that is used as authentication to access a bank account (a very bad idea despite what some banks tell you).

So how do scammers get sufficient audio to clone someone’s voice?  Audio can be obtained from social media posts or even the voice mail message greeting you make and have on your phone.  The readily available voice cloning technology has gotten so sophisticated that only a few seconds of audio recordings are required to clone that person’s voice.

TIPS

To start off, my advice is to not use voice verification for your bank account and just as we all should be protective of personal information we post on social media that can be leveraged against us for scams and identity theft purposes, we should consider whether we also wish to take the risk of posting audio.  As for the voice message on your phone, you would be wise to refrain from recording your own message and use a generic greeting provided by your phone carrier.  It may seem paranoid, but even paranoids have enemies.

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