Ai scamming

Are we sure it's AI?
I've heard of this scam happening maybe a decade ago with my extended family. The voice was a real person overseas with a lot of exp tricking grandparents. Scammers only had basic information.
They act as a freaked out kid and the victim gets roped in. They scam for thousands of dollars each time, even succeeding a few times a day would net a big profit. Also cell connections are low fidelity, I bet that aids their ability to trick the victim.
- Yeah this happened to my grandparents, they just say “I sound like shit because I’ve been crying”
  
  A former colleague’s parents were scammed; their “kid” (the scammer) had a “broken nose”.
- Same. Years ago my grandfather received a call from a guy claiming to be my younger, male cousin saying he was in jail for something and needed bail. Luckily (?), my grandfather was an asshole and told him to call his mother.
- Yeah, my dad called me one day asking if my brother was out if the country because our grandma got a call saying he was kidnapped in Mexico and she needed to put up money for his release.
  It's wild.

Not sure I buy this tbh.
- I don't know, the "Spanish prisoner" is a scam that seems to be reinvented every few years every time we see a little bit of a change in technology. It wouldn't take much to fake a person's voice with a trained model, especially if that person has an online profile open to the public where they post content in their own voice.
  
  The Spanish Prisoner is also an excellent David Mamet film.
- Yeah, it has some sus vibes. I'm usually far too trusting, but here even my bullshit detectors rang
  
  You know that old adage "Never attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by stupidity"?
  We need a new one along the lines of "Never attribute to truth that which can be easily explained by attention-starved teenagers"
- I could easily conceive some tricks to get clips of a person’s voice without them realizing. I’d write them out but… that would be stupid of me. Humans have more vulnerabilities than computers.
- Yeah, unless this person runs a YouTube or podcast it seems implausible. What would you train a random AI on for the normal person?
  I could see a situation where you hack a phone, get the contacts and call history, pick the 1st or 2nd most dialed number, have a bot call that person to get samples, then go back to the original phone and try this... I mean, eventually you'd get a hit?

Where did they get their voice?
- You can train AI with just a single voice clip. You can do this on your desktop. Microsoft doesn't need to sell shit, you put that clip on tiktok yourself.
  
  You don’t even need to upload anything. They can call you, have a short convo and then just say “oh sorry wrong number” or something. You’d never know.
  
  Really? How?
  
  Well they said they dont share their voice anywhere, if thats true it would be concerning. I for one just dont use any centralized unencrypted services that could scrape my voice but i would assume most people think that if they dont publish anything, they are safe...

When I was a kid, my parents had "the talk" with me. It was about sex. Now I'm older and my parents are too. I have to have "the talk" with them. It's about scams.
- My uncle got divorced a few years back and it nearly crushed him. He we a ridiculously handsome young and successful man, so women chased him. At any point when he was younger he had at least a handful of women actively pursuing him. Now he was older and divorced. Those women were long gone, all having married and carried on with their lives. He didn’t expect to struggle with dating like he did and that made the whole thing even harder.
  I set him up on all of the big dating sites. I didn’t know how bad it was, I’d never used them.
  He was talking to at least 10 scammers a day, probably more.
  He’s kind of a miser so no one was going to get any of his money, but his hobbies showed his wealth and oh boy did they try.
  It was so bad that he gave up on the dating sites entirely. He’s had a few girlfriends since then but he only met one person in over a year on the dating sites.
  It blows my mind just how many people are out there making a living scamming people.
  
  The sad thing is that, in the current era, virtually all dating sites are scams riddled with bots and have been for over a decade. Their goal is to make money not produce matches.
- If you're not careful, the subject of both those "talks" will fuck you raw

The only way to train an AI voice model is to have lots of samples. As scummy as they are, neither Microsoft nor Apple is selling your voice recordings with enough info to link them to you specifically. This person probably just forgot about an old social post where they talk for enough time for a model to be trained. Still super scary stuff.
- Not true anymore. You can create a reasonable voice clone with like 30 seconds of audio now (11labs for example doesn't do any kind of authentication). The results are good enough for this kind of thing, especially in a lower bandwidth situation like a phone call.
- This person probably just forgot about an old social post…
  Or recordings made during customer service calls, maybe a disgruntled employee decides to repurpose the data.
- True for creating voices at all, but that work has already been done.
  Now we're just taking these large AI's trained to mimic voices and giving them a 30 second audio clip to tell them what to mimic. It can be done quickly and give convincing results especially when hidden by the phonecall quality.

Uh there's zero chance these big techs are selling voices like this. Also, this sounds very targeted and planned, so there must be more context to this. Also, why the hell are they on bluesky?
- They're on BlueSky because there are more people there that would actually believe this total load of bullshit. Plenty of scams that will claim to be vague family member (no names; just like "son" or "daughter," "aunt" or "uncle") but highly unlikely they're getting an AI to mimic your voice. Just like vagueness of the family member they claim to be, the voices used may coincidentally sound similar.
  
  All of these articles are making it up then? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/business/voice-deepfakes-bank-scams.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/29/us/ai-scam-calls-kidnapping-cec/index.html https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/experts-warn-rise-scammers-ai-mimic-voices-loved/story?id=100769857 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-supercharges-voice-scams-making-it-easier-for-americans-to-fall-prey-143635279.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/scammers-ai-mimic-voices-loved-ones-in-distress/
- Because its probably the best twitter alternative
  
  Not even close to Mastodon
- I wish I were this naive
- Oh they totally are. Maybe not this directly, but there is an awful depth to the data market. One company may be selling to the next and the next and you end up with companies just buying all the data they can to sell police surveillance software running off of fucking Candy Crush telemetry.

All those TV shows that taught us how to spot which twin was the evil one by asking about life history were just training us to beat AI
- Given the sheer scale of data collection now, i doubt even that will protect us into the future
  
  Our only hope is to be nice to the AI so that when it's running the show, it's nice to us....
- They can also be used to train the ai...

Voicemail greeting.
- I dont have one. The automated message is just reading my number and telling you to leave a message.
- People still set that?
- My voicemail is just me going "BRRRRRRRKZM" or some sort of screaming distorted gibberish
  
  "Just the fax, ma'am."

you don't even need to fake a voice for these scams tho, it's very difficult to differentiate q voice while you're crying

Do a lot of people put their voice on the internet "as much as they're able to"? It sounds like that person may post their voice online more than the average person...
- Discord just automatically started putting you opt in for having your voice recorded for clips
- If you post videos of yourself online, your voice will be caught. Whether social media or public presence as a streamer. I’m pretty sure that’s all they meant.
- I imagine even discounting social media self-posts, there are VoIP calls, etc.
  Don't assume a call with your mom through Facebook Messenger or Zoom or FaceTime or whatever is not somehow packaged and sold.
- Everyone shhhhhhhh

My grandmother got a call from scammers pretending to be me. They didn't use my name, but I was the only adult granddaughter at the time lol. Anyway, the scammers said that they needed money for hospital bills and a bus ticket home. They said they got into a fight at a friend's funeral in New Jersey and had to go to the hospital. And then after that their car got stolen. My grandmother knew that I was not in New Jersey, and told the scammers that she'd call them back once she got to the bank. She then informed my parents, who told me. It was hilarious.

Waiting for the comment that's going to say something like, "Joke's on you, my parents don't even talk to me."
- My parents probably do not talk to you either.
  
  Mine can't stand them.

Seriously, it was only one person, and it was with a golf cart.

I advise everyone to contact their loved ones and inform them of this possibility. I also advise having some codeword that would be used if there was an emergency and money needs to be sent.
For example is more than $100 is being asked for we have to share the code word or we should not transfer money.
- The code word is Donkeyballs
  
  Hey is me, your cousin. I'm kinda in a jam and need your help. The contractor cut me a huge check after the fire that took everything but the bank won't cash it without proof. I just need $101 for proof and I can pay back immediately.
  This is for real.
  Thanks.
  Donkeyballs
  
  Pashang.

Tbh it’s not that hard to stop scams. Treat EVERY call you get as a scammer!
Either phone back on a known number, not some shit they give you or if they claim you need bail, ask for a reference number and the place being held and phone them after looking up the number, and If they get pissed, it’s a scam!
No real police force is going to care/shouldn’t care if you call back. It’s not like cops get a percentage of bail money but scammers always seem too desperate to get you to pay and lose it pretty quick.

What kind of bill are you going to pay for killing 2 people tho

They don't even have to scrape calls. If you use Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant, they already have recordings of your voice on their servers