You get a call and there's a frantic voice on the line. It's your grandson -- he's in jail and needs money for bail. In a panic, you give out your credit card number.
A little later, when a quick check-in confirms your grandson is not in trouble after all, you realize you've been scammed. But the guy on the phone sounded just like your grandson. How were you fleeced? Meet artificial intelligence voice cloning.
Voice cloning technology has grown more sophisticated as text-to-speech AI technology has improved. While the technology holds promise for consumers, such as medical assistance for those who may have lost their voices due to accident or illness, it can also be used to scam and harm consumers.
Officials say AI voice cloning makes it easier for scammers to impersonate family, friends or business executives, and enables fraudsters to deceive consumers by appropriating the voices of creative professionals.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, all a scammer needs is a short audio clip of your family member's voice — which they could get from content posted online — and a voice-cloning program. When the scammer calls you, they'll sound just like your loved one.
How can you tell if a family member is in trouble or if it's really just a scammer using a cloned voice? You can take several actions.
• Don't trust the voice. If you receive a call from a loved one asking for money or making requests that are out of character, be skeptical. Ask the person a question that only they would know the answer to and then call or text the person back to verify it was them who had called.
• Set your social media settings to private. Publicly available information can easily be gained by scammers.
• Know the signs of a scam. While the technology to trick you is changing, a scammer's methods are typically the same. Scammers ask you to pay or send money in ways that make it hard to get your money back. If the caller says to wire money, send cryptocurrency or buy gift cards and give them the card numbers and PINs, those could be signs of a scam.
• Block the phone number on your device.
Last month, the FTC announced the Voice Cloning Challenge to help promote the development of ideas to protect consumers from the misuse of AI-enabled voice cloning for fraud and other harms. The winner gets $25,000.
"We will use every tool to prevent harm to the public stemming from abuses of voice cloning technology," Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. "We want to address harms before they hit the marketplace, and enforce the law when they do."