Arizona Mother Issues Warning About AI Voice Cloning After Kidnapping Scam

An Arizona mother received an unexpected phone call from her daughter, only it wasn’t actually her daughter calling.

Jennifer DeStefano’s 15-year-old daughter called her while out of town on a ski trip, so DeStefano didn’t assume anything was out of the ordinary.

“I pick up the phone, and I hear my daughter’s voice, ‘Mom!’ and she’s sobbing,” DeStefano told a local news station affiliated with CBS.

Responding to her daughter’s voice asking, “What happened?” Her daughter replied: “‘Mom, I messed up,’ and she’s sobbing and crying,” DeStefano told the outlet.

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DeStefano then begins to panic as she hears a man’s voice in the background.

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“I hear a man’s voice say, ‘Put your head back. Lie down,’ DeStefano said, confused as to what was actually happening to her daughter.

“This man gets on the phone, and he’s like, ‘Listen here. I’ve got your daughter. This is how it’s going to go down. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m going to pop her so full of drugs. I’m going to have my way with her, and I’m going to drop her off in Mexico,” DeStefano explains.

The frightened mother begins shaking as she can hear her daughter yelling, “Help me, Mom. Please help me. Help me,” DeStefano said.

Despite the frightening call, DeStefano’s daughter’s voice was a clone created by artificial intelligence.

DeStefano was able to quickly confirm her daughter was safe from family members.

Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University specializing in AI, explained how realistic and confusing it can be to detect a deep fake voice.

“You can no longer trust your ears,”  Kambhampati said in an interview with WKYT.

With the constantly advancing technology, voice cloning makes it easier for individuals to create another personality and voiceover.

“In the beginning, it would require a larger amount of samples. Now there are ways in which you can do this with just three seconds of your voice. Three seconds. And with the three seconds, it can come close to how exactly you sound,” Kambhampati said.

Read the full story here.

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This is an excerpt from The Epoch Times.