Cyber criminals are using a new tactic to steal your data

Many of us have gotten savvy to emails and text messages from scammers urgently requesting you click on a fake link. However, new technologies are making it so much harder to spot scams, particularly as hackers use voice cloning to impersonate your loved ones and steal money. According to a report from a remote biometric digital authentication and automated onboarding technology platform called iiDENTIFii, fraudsters will use a loved one’s voice to trick their victims into sending money.

If your family member calls you unexpectedly saying they’re in trouble and need help, you likely wouldn’t hesitate or think twice, trusting the voice on the other end.

But anyone who has spent time on Youtube or TikTok over the past few months knows that the latest AI technology has become so powerful it can clone the voices of US presidents like Biden and Trump to make viral gaming videos.

Microsoft has recently piloted an AI tool called VALL-E. It can clone a person’s voice just by listening to a few seconds of an audio clip and then generate audio in a wide range of different languages.

With just a short audio clip of a family member’s voice, which can be stolen from social media, scammers can use a voice cloning program to impersonate them.

This threat has become so serious that the US Federal Trade Commission recently issued an urgent warning calling consumers to be vigilant for calls that sound exactly like their loved ones, the Mirror reports.

Gur Geva, founder and CEO of iiDENTIFii, said: “The technology required to impersonate an individual has become cheaper, easier to use and more accessible. This means that it is simpler than ever before for a criminal to assume one aspect of a person’s identity.”

Audio recognition technology has been a standard security solution for many business and financial services companies around the world.

Barclays, for example, integrated Apple’s Siri to facilitate mobile banking payments without the need to open or log into the banking app. Visa partnered with Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank to introduce a biometric voice and voice-based authentication platform for e-commerce which uses biometric sensors built into a standard smartphone.