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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

#91

Post by technothrasher »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #26
revolvingthrow wrote: post #20

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…

I don't know about that but finding excuses for the scum of this earth is certainly not a solution. Take Europe for example: nobody dies of hunger in Europe. And yet there are plenty of thieves. People stealing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of EUR aren't doing it to "feed their families". Think of the situation today. Think of the victims today . Instead of thinking of tomorrow's hypothetical sit…

> Take Europe for example: nobody dies of hunger in Europe.

Nobody? France, as the most extreme example, has a rate of 1.52 per 100K. That's about a thousand people a year. That is certainly a small percentage of the population, but it isn't "nobody".

https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit...

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

#92

Post by pessimizer »

Aurornis wrote: post #83
skybrian wrote: post #21

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…

> Artificial intelligence tools are used within a structured and supervised workflow as research and drafting instruments. This has become the highbrow way of admitting that AI is writing the articles: Calling it “drafting” is another way of saying that the article was written by AI and the person publishing it maybe reviewed it. Maybe they skimmed it and published it directly. For what it’s worth the article felt ob…

> Calling it “drafting” is another way of saying that the article was written by AI and the person publishing it maybe reviewed it.

I don't think that's a safe assumption. You could construct an article pretty quickly if you had a topic, a few points to hit, a conclusion and a short list of links, then fed that to the machine. All the LLM would be doing is fluffing it up with worthless words, unnecessary metaphors and maybe a pop culture reference or two so it looks like what people expect from an "article."

"Rewrite this as a slate dot com article"

If it were an email newsletter instead, there wouldn't be that fluffy expectation and you could just leave the bullet points and links as they were.

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

#93

Post by vidarh »

mikepurvis wrote: post #68
saidnooneever wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agreed key phrases. id recommend it. something unrelated to the family and totally arbitrary, agreedupon only verbally. (or write it down for them if they are old and memory is an issue. you can remind them to read your note out loud.. easy). this way, you do not footgun yourself in the event you'd ever need to ask something. Money isnt the only thing they can ask, and no one (i think) has a glass orb to tell their…

Key phrases make sense to put in place, but another easy safeguard is: "Before you send anything to anyone, ever, call them back. Doesn't matter if it's me, the bank, a lawyer, whatever... tell them 'hang on I have another call coming in, let me just call you back in a few minutes, okay?'"

I overheard a cab driver being scammed by someone claiming to be HMRC (UK version of the IRS), and when he asked to call them back they managed to convince him to call them back on Viber, and he was about to when I intervened and pointed out to him that 1) what I'd overheard was blatantly a scam, 2) if he was unsure, to go to their official website and find their number...

If you're going to get people to call you back, it has the problem of ensuring that they call you back on your real number - giving reasons why they have to call you back on some other number is way too easy ("I've lost my phone", "my phone is at home", and so on)

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

#94

Post by root-parent »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #36
offsign wrote: post #22

Sounds like AI is just greasing the wheels of a long established 'grandparent scam'... goes something like this: 1) voice one: young adult calls, sobbing 2) grandparent inquires with a name... "Ben, is that you?" 3) voice one: "Yes grandma, it's me, Ben... I'm in trouble, please don't tell mom 4) voice two: "Hello, I'm attorney..." My grandmother fell victim to this almost 20 years ago, which only stopped when Wester…

I told my parents that I will never ask for money, doesn't matter the situation, even with live video, it's trivial to generate live audio and video nowadays. I hope they got the message.

The best things to stop these AI voice schemes, is to agree on a family password. The cloned AI voice will not known it.

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

#95

Post by vidarh »

saaaaaam wrote: post #62
skybrian wrote: post #21

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.

That's pure generic "I'm getting paid by the word" article writing. If it reads to AI to you it's in part because AI has been trained on a billion articles like that.

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

#96

Post by Martinussen »

xp84 wrote: post #87
ceejayoz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, man. That does seem likely. What a world. I wonder if eventually there won’t be a human in the loop, just a model trained to make money with a strategy like that, automatedly selecting victims and a person to be impersonated for each. Pre-render a few videos, place multiple calls in parallel. Basically a turnkey Docker container that takes a bitcoin address as a parameter and fills it with stolen money.

Just add video and a better voip endpoint to existing setups and you're already there. A lot of scams can be (and are) run by a small handful of people now. Phishing at scale with stuff like fake tracking links etc. is already fully automated by people in a ton of ways and can definitely handle some back-and-forth over sms/whatsapp/whatever.

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

#97

Post by xp84 »

hyperhello wrote: post #51
cik wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet all of this can be easily defeated with soft language. The basic check "what's the password/verification word" will defeat this every time. This is basically opsec that we taught my grandparents, who were in their 90s. Its doable.

So they trick the kid out of the password first by calling them and pretending to be the parent.

Hilarious. “Hey, someone who says they’re you is calling me. Remind me again what the password is that they’re supposed to say?”

“Grandma the password is ‘Integra’ but I can just tell you now, it’s not me calling you, it must be a sca—“

“Thanks got it byeeeeee”

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

#98

Post by Aurornis »

pessimizer wrote: post #92
Aurornis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Artificial intelligence tools are used within a structured and supervised workflow as research and drafting instruments. This has become the highbrow way of admitting that AI is writing the articles: Calling it “drafting” is another way of saying that the article was written by AI and the person publishing it maybe reviewed it. Maybe they skimmed it and published it directly. For what it’s worth the article felt ob…

> Calling it “drafting” is another way of saying that the article was written by AI and the person publishing it maybe reviewed it. I don't think that's a safe assumption. You could construct an article pretty quickly if you had a topic, a few points to hit, a conclusion and a short list of links, then fed that to the machine. All the LLM would be doing is fluffing it up with worthless words, unnecessary metaphors an…

> I don't think that's a safe assumption. You could construct an article pretty quickly if you had a topic, a few points to hit, a conclusion and a short list of links, then fed that to the machine. All the LLM would be doing is fluffing it up with worthless words, unnecessary metaphors and maybe a pop culture reference or two so it looks like what people expect from an "article."

We’re not disagreeing? That’s basically what I said: The AI wrote the article. Saying it drafted the article is a way of admitting it was written by AI but making it sound like it was actually a journalistic endeavor.

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

#99

Post by arbuge »

"They kidnapped my daughter? That's terrible. Yes, I'll definitely pay the ransom but to get access to my bank account I need you to write a poem about corn and a curl script in PHP. Please go ahead."

Inspired by this headline I saw in the news today... haven't read the full article yet: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/now-defenders-are-e...

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

#100

Post by xp84 »

christkv wrote: post #29

We all have a safe word in the family just for this issue to identify if it´s the real person or not.

Someone else pointed out how easy it would be to make a video of anyone having a finger cut off, or similar torture, to scare the victim into believing that the “grandchild” forgot their password and needs you to override the password protocol to save their other 9 fingers. I have to agree. That’s like 80¢ of compute to do. If that’s effective even 30% of the time, it means “just have a password” doesn’t make you safe.
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