Across the United States, a new wave of devastating cyber fraud is taking hold, powered by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence that can replicate a human’s voice with unsettling, near-perfect accuracy. For victims like Buffalo, New York, resident Liz Benz, the experience remains traumatic even after the scam is exposed.
Benz, a 46-year-old insurance broker and mother of six, still remembers the gut punch of answering an unknown number one afternoon. On the line was a voice that was undeniably her 16-year-old son Fred, crying and shaken, begging for help. The caller told Benz that Fred’s friend had been shot dead, and Fred, who was attending a local high school football game, was being held hostage. To secure his release, Benz was ordered to withdraw a large sum of cash and drop it off at a nearby Walmart parking lot.
For 20 gut-wrenching minutes, Benz believed her son’s life was in danger. It was only when Fred sent a smiling selfie from the stands of the game that she realized she had fallen victim to an elaborate AI-powered scam. “Nothing could have prepared me to hear my son’s voice, and nothing could have convinced me that this was a scam until I saw my son with my own eyes,” Benz told AFP in an interview, her voice still shaking with the memory of the ordeal. “It was a good 20 minutes of terror.”
Benz is far from alone. As accessible AI voice cloning tools have become widely available online, U.S. law enforcement and consumer protection advocates are sounding the alarm over a sharp rise in family impersonation scams that exploit emotional panic to steal thousands of dollars from victims. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation data released in April, U.S. consumers lost more than $893 million last year to AI-enabled fraud schemes, including voice cloning scams.
What makes this threat particularly widespread is how easy it has become for even inexperienced cybercriminals to carry out these attacks. A simple internet search pulls up dozens of free voice cloning applications that can generate a hyper-realistic replica of a person’s voice using just a few seconds of original audio, which scammers can easily harvest from public social media posts, voicemail recordings, or online videos.
“It used to be somewhat hard to make these things. Now anyone can do it in seconds,” explained Brian Long, chief executive of Adaptive Security, a firm that specializes in AI fraud awareness training. “One guy in a room with a keyboard can make an infinite number of attackers. AI tools can build entire scam scripts off of short snippets of audio captured from public online content.”
The standard scam script follows a predictable, emotionally manipulative pattern: scammers place an urgent call claiming the target’s loved one has been arrested, injured in a car crash, or involved in a violent crime, and demands immediate payment to resolve the situation. To add credibility, scammers often layer in additional AI-generated voices impersonating police officers, attorneys, court clerks, or bank employees, creating a chaotic narrative that pushes victims to act before they can verify the story.
Cybersecurity experts note that scammers do not even need a perfectly replicated voice to succeed. A convincing distressed voice that triggers an immediate emotional reaction is often enough to bypass a victim’s critical thinking. “A distressed voice saying ‘mom, help me’ or ‘dad, I’ve been in an accident’ may only need to sound believable for a few seconds,” said Amit Gupta, vice president of product management at cybersecurity firm Pindrop. “The objective is not perfect voice replication. The objective is creating enough emotional uncertainty and urgency that the victim acts before verifying.”
Since Benz went public with her story, she has received hundreds of messages from other scam victims, most of whom choose to remain anonymous out of feelings of shame and embarrassment. Vulnerable populations, particularly elderly Americans, are disproportionately targeted in what have become known as “grandparent scams”, where scammers impersonate a grandchild in crisis.
FBI data shows that Americans over the age of 60 reported more than $7.7 billion in total fraud losses last year, a significant jump from 2023. For 73-year-old Philadelphia attorney Gary Schildhorn, who fell victim to a similar scam in 2020, the experience was equally shocking. Schildhorn received a call from an AI-generated voice impersonating his son Brett, who claimed he needed immediate bail money after a drunk driving arrest. Schildhorn rushed to his bank to withdraw the funds, only to get a call from his real son mid-transaction, alerting him to the scam.
“I will go to my grave swearing that it was your voice, it was your cadence, it was words you would use. There was no accent. It was you on the phone,” Schildhorn told AFP, recalling his conversation with his son after the incident. Like Benz, Schildhorn now partners with Adaptive Security to raise public awareness of the growing AI scam threat, and testified before the U.S. Senate in 2023 about his experience to push for stronger consumer protections.