You don’t talk to anyone on the phone through a pbx? Never call your bank? Your doctor? Your credit card company? Any of your insurance company? Even on private systems all of those calls are recorded for legal reasons. And all of them will eventually be compromised.

The 'old' way of faking someone's voice like you saw in 90s spy movies was to get enough sample data to capture each possible speech sound someone could make, such that those sounds can be combined to form all possible words.

With AI training you only need enough data to know what someone sounds like 'in general' to extrapolate a reasonable model.

One possible source of voice data is spam-calls.

You get a call, say "Hello?" And then someone launches into trying to sell you insurance or some rubbish, you say "Sorry I'm not interested, take me off your list please. Okay, bye" and hang up.

And that is already enough data to replicate your voice.

When scammers make the call using your fake voice, they usually use a crappy quality line, or background noise, or other techniques to cover up any imperfections in the voice replica. And of course they make it really emotional, urgent and high-stakes to override your family member's logical thinking.

Educating your family to be prepared for this stuff is really important.

He really struggled with it.

I’d do a reverse image search and find the actual person, he’d thank me and move on. Some of them got in his head. One even faked a Skype call with a video of a beautiful woman and somehow scouted his Facebook profile to really dive deep into his personality. The video was like 13 pixels and she’d say, “I’m sorry, I live way out in the wilderness and we have bad satellite internet.”

He said, “She’s too good to be true. No one is this agreeable.” I told him to ask her to make a specific gesture because of all of scammers. He did, he asked her to hold her hands above her head in the shape of a triangle. She refused, said something like, “I can’t believe you don’t trust me. That breaks my heart. You know me.” She stopped talking to him, a couple weeks later she messaged, “I’m so sorry, my mom is in the hospital and I have no money to eat. I wouldn’t ask you but I have been alone so long you’re all I know.” He told her if it was that desperate she could prove who she is and he’d help. Nope. Nothing. Radio silence. That one really hurt him. Whoever it was played the scam game real good.

You might not believe this, but I have a cousin (my mom’s first cousin actually) who fell in love with her scammer. He conned her out of thousands of dollars, turned out to be from Nigeria when he said he was from somewhere else. About 6 months in he said, “Listen. I am not who I have said I am. My real name is John, I am truly in love with you. I know you and I want you to really know me.”

She was in her 50s, he was in his 30s. She was not an attractive woman. She was short, fat, walked with a limp and was born with physical deformities (her nickname to us kids was “old bat”, playfully of course). He wasn’t attractive either, but still. 20 years younger, from another country, had, I don’t know, scammed her. My mom tried her best to stop it, but she flew to Nigeria and married the dude. She stayed over there a few months and then he flew back with her. He stayed with her about 4 years I guess, and he ran around with any woman who would have him. He finally drained her money and rolled out.

The last thing I heard about him, he was arrested for breaking into the grocery store he worked at and robbing the safe.

It is crazy to me just how much money can motivate people to do absurd and crazy things. I can’t relate at all. I’ve been broke as shit and all I had to do was sell a few things to get back on track and I couldn’t motivate myself to even do that. Money just doesn’t mean enough to me to go to any trouble to get it haha.