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

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231–240 of 255 posts

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

#231
post #187

Sad times are coming for a lot of families and individuals. It isn't just that technology is upending our naive ideas of trust and authenticity. This is, essentially, the broad class of "confused deputy" attacks. And the robust mitigation is to disempower the easily confused deputy, rather than to think you can block confusing signals. A looming problem with shifts in demographics and family structure is that many pe…

Disempowering deputies is how you end up with customer service that can't actually provide service to customers. Low-trust societies are a huge efficiency loss, and just a general pain in the ass if you are acting in good faith.

Like it or not, the Earth is a very low trust community. Old people get scammed by scammers from all over. This is a global problem, not a local problem

The global community is very low trust, unfortunately. That might be an unfixable problem

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, it's all worth it so long as we can get braindead summaries we didn't ask for, pretend to be the 10x engineer we always wanted to be, and generate fake videos for internet points! (sarcastic rant over) Most of the benefits of AI are being overshadowed by the lack of regulation and reckless abandon at which they are being developed. Given the current trajectory I don't know if that's going to change befor…

And the crux of it all is people over promising and refusing to recalibrate expectations. LLM’s are kind of incredible, but we did not develop some magical tool that can do everyone’s job for them and/or answer every question with even semi-regular accuracy. it is a far more limited tool than any company, politician, or AI evangelist is willing to admit

It's hard to measure but I would put money that AI is enabling a lot more harm than it is boosting productivity

If you think it is boosting productivity a lot that's fine. Just realize that it is probably enabling even more harm than that

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

#233
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the sneaky bit they don’t tell you when you hear the “This call may be monitored or recorded” part.

Alas this was set up before good voice cloning happened. So was very much an active plan not covert. I asked if it can be disabled but apparently no. Not end of world - it’s not the primary Auth means but still not ideal.

If I'm not mistaken, that's how pindrop does it. Ambient noise analysis

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

#234
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…

YC S27's ScamMyGrandparents.com lets you simulate these against your own grandparents, so you can shame and educate them when they naively wire your college trust fund to a safe account. You are able to refund either the whole amount, or keep some for yourself since they won't know any better. The cost of service is variable depending on how many homes they own.

You got me dead to rights with this, because I literally bought dontscamgrandma.com earlier this week and it took a heart jumping second to catch the joke.

We're staying away from the trust funds and shame though.

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

#235
post #151
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try, but our password is the same as the password to my HN account, and for security HN automatically censors your password if you type it in a comment. See: *******

Joke's on you, now I know your password is 7 chars, but more importantly, I also know your password is not 7 stars.

It's seven 7s, but I've never told anyone the order, so it's safe.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the crux of it all is people over promising and refusing to recalibrate expectations. LLM’s are kind of incredible, but we did not develop some magical tool that can do everyone’s job for them and/or answer every question with even semi-regular accuracy. it is a far more limited tool than any company, politician, or AI evangelist is willing to admit

It's hard to measure but I would put money that AI is enabling a lot more harm than it is boosting productivity If you think it is boosting productivity a lot that's fine. Just realize that it is probably enabling even more harm than that

I’m in the harm “it causes more harm than good” camp tbh

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

#237
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great idea. What do you use as your family password?

Nice try, but our password is the same as the password to my HN account, and for security HN automatically censors your password if you type it in a comment. See: *******

bollocks that doesn't work

proof of pudding: *******

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

#238
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…

YC S27's ScamMyGrandparents.com lets you simulate these against your own grandparents, so you can shame and educate them when they naively wire your college trust fund to a safe account. You are able to refund either the whole amount, or keep some for yourself since they won't know any better. The cost of service is variable depending on how many homes they own.

in 2026 grift is the way of life, not crazy to see YC going that way eventually

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 separat…

Claude’s excessive wordiness getting in the way of actual information is a huge problem. It completely garbles things a lot of the time now. It’s like it’s trying too hard to impress by using ten words where it could use three. I assume they’ve upped the weight of Reddit posts or something in an attempt to make it sound more authentic, with the result that it often sounds like a stupid person’s idea of a clever person.

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

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of which, what happened to SHAKEN/STIR? I thought the strong authentication requirements came down the pipe years ago and they were going to start turning off (or hiding by default) routes of low reputation. That was years ago, it was supposed to take years, but here we are years later and I still get loads of spam calls. What happened?

I worked on STIR/SHAKEN for the two biggest US operators. The techies tried very hard to make it work, and, indeed, there was a brief time when it worked pretty well, but, the incentives from Corporate were and are fundamentally misaligned. Type A attestation is, generally, solved. Carrier A attests that the number is one of theirs, and they know that the caller is one of theirs too and attached to their network. How…

So we can't block shady spammers because business wants shady customer support call centers? Ugh. It figures, but ugh.

Thanks for the inside perspective.

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