Her grandson's voice said he was under arrest. This senior was almost scammed with suspected AI voice cloning
CBC
The voice was convincing.
The caller identified himself as police, but then another voice came on the line.
"He goes, 'Hi Grandma. Yeah, I got in trouble here. The police say they need some money to release me or they're going to keep me in jail,'" Kevin Crawford recalls.
His mother, Marilyn, had just been awakened by the call. And the Ontario senior was certain it was her grandson, Ian, on the phone.
She was told he'd been arrested for stealing a car and that he needed $9,000 sent to police for his release.
Only, it wasn't Ian. It was a scam phone call so convincing that Kevin and Marilyn wonder if fraudsters used artificial intelligence to clone Ian's voice.
And Crawford says that even though the voice sounded slightly different, it convinced her enough to agree to pay up.
"I was anxious to get the money out; I'd do anything for my grandchildren," she said of the conversation from 2021.
It's known broadly as the "emergency" or "grandparent" scam: the caller claims to be the victim's grandchild and is in the middle of a crisis, usually saying that a crime has been committed — and they need money. They instruct the grandparent or intended victim to tell no one.
And it's been a successful ploy; Canadians reported losing nearly $3 million to this scam in 2024, according to figures from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
In the U.S., the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network sounded the alarm in a November 2024 report, warning that such "highly realistic" deepfakes "can manufacture what appear to be real events, such as a person doing or saying something they did not actually do or say."
The report flags the same family emergency scheme experienced by Crawford in which "scammers may use deepfake voices or videos to impersonate a victim's family member, friend, or other trusted individual."
Experts suggest that using AI to impersonate someone is happening more often, according to the anecdotes at a global fraud conference convened by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners in 2024. Thousands of investigators and other officials discussed how the rise of artificial intelligence can be useful in investigations but that it's also used proficiently by scammers to target the most vulnerable — and use their own social media posts against them.
Keith Elliott, a certified fraud examiner and private investigator, says it's remarkably easy because people unwittingly supply fraudsters with vast amounts of personal information.
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