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The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

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Re: The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

#71
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember my JROTC instructor also running into that and how she said afterwards they have a secret phrase between them two as a way of verifying it's truly them.

It's very, very hard for untrained people to be strict about verifying any secret phrase. The attacker can make all kinds of excuses, while creating urgency, and many people quickly abandon verifying the phrase. A scene in One Battle After Another comes to mind.

At some point, the scam evolves to a live video of a gagged loved one being tortured. "Stop wasting my time or they lose another finger."

People aren't prepared for this shit.

Re: The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

#72
post #34

What’s terrible is each time I am forced to call the bank, the more they try to tell me voice ID is secure and want me to provide my voice to authenticate. Never. Did ya’ll never play Uplink? With voice cloning as good as it is now, there’s no way a voice ID is secure enough for authentication.

name and shame the bank

Schwab still does voice passwords. "At Schwab, my voice is my password"

https://www.schwab.com/voice-id

Re: The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

#74

This blog is kind of an interesting hybrid: > Every article published on SmarterArticles is authored and editorially controlled by Tim Green. Artificial intelligence tools are used within a structured and supervised workflow as research and drafting instruments. All arguments, framing decisions, source selections, and final publication choices remain human-directed and under my full responsibility. There are referenc…

Interesting. To me it reeks of AI, and the first major tell was the first paragraph, at which point I stopped reading. > No human had. The crying had been synthesised from a fragment of audio, and the daughter she thought she was rescuing existed only as a pattern of numbers in someone else's machine.

Yeah, I can't explain it but the headings feel very AI. And there are a bunch of things in the text that remind me of chats I have with Claude during the day job

>and it is worth being clear about why

>The emotional mechanism the scam exploits is not a gap in knowledge that a leaflet can fill; it is the love a person has for their grandchild, weaponised

>These are not the numbers of a credulous minority being separated from pocket money. They are the numbers of a generation's accumulated savings being drained

>that a fraud requiring the absolute frontier of machine learning can be perpetrated against an ordinary grandmother in her kitchen, at scale, for the price of nothing

(To be clear this isn't automatically disqualifying to me. But I am interested in LLM writing patterns and my ability to detect them. And in the case of this article I sense the kind of linguistic padding that has made Claude a little harder to work with in the more recent Opus point releases because it obscures the most important bits of information.)

Re: The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

#76
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

name and shame the bank

Schwab still does voice passwords. "At Schwab, my voice is my password" https://www.schwab.com/voice-id

> my voice is my password

So... This has to be a Sneakers reference, right?

Re: The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

#77

The problem described in the article is unsolvable, given that a mid-range desktop from a few years ago can easily clone a voice that's convincing enough and there are no guardrails to those. Some silly KYC laws might limit a highschool kid making deepfakes of his crush, but once a model exists it's trivial to spread it around, and for organized groups to get ahold of those. Similar will happen with images, it's just…

> The problem described in the article is unsolvable Well, not completely unsolvable. But nobody would like the solution. What all these scams rely on is a way to transfer money in an irrevocable fashion. Restrict that in meaningful ways and you end a lot of the abilities for these scams to operate. You could, for example, outlaw gift cards as a start. You could force the likes of Western Union to have a holding peri…

Also education. No court or attorney is going to demand payment of any fines or bail in gift cards or send a courier to pick up cash.

High schools should teach how to spot a scam. As others have observed, this is not a new one, it's just gotten more high-tech and convincing. This is one of many practical things our schools should teach about that they just don't.

Re: The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence

#78

So, you answer your phone to the scam and… now they have your voice too. Talking on the phone is now an unmitigated liability.

The only solution? Answer the phone in an over the top comedy accent, such as Simpsons characters, or just whatever comes to mind.

I just don't answer the phone. If it's important, they can leave a message.
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