Fraudulent calls utilizing AI voice cloning are becoming more prevalent, with threats from deepfakes and synthetic media reported to have increased exponentially. These scams can impersonate familiar individuals, requesting urgent actions like transferring money or revealing sensitive information. The process involves collecting voice samples, inputting them into AI speech synthesis engines to recreate the individual’s voice, and optionally spoofing caller ID. With a growing sophistication in execution, the challenges to detect and defend against such scams are considerable.
Collecting voice samples of the person who will be impersonated. Samples as short as three seconds are sometimes adequate. They can come from videos, online meetings, or previous voice calls.
An optional step is to spoof the number belonging to the person or organization being impersonated. These sorts of techniques have been in use for decades.
Feeding the samples into AI-based speech synthesis engines allows the attacker to use a text-to-speech interface that produces user-chosen words in a voice tone and conversational tics of the person being impersonated.
Researchers and government officials have been warning of the threat for years, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency saying in 2023 that threats from deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media have increased 'exponentially.'
Collection
[
|
...
]