“Hello my son, it’s mom”: crooks tried to trap this Charentais with a cloned voice

It’s a phone call he’s unlikely to forget. It was 9 p.m. this Sunday, September 22 when a resident of Angoulême (Charente) received a hidden call on his phone. “I hear ‘hello my son, it’s mom’. It was my mother’s voice.” says the fifty-year-old, who prefers to remain anonymous, in the TF1 news report at the top of this article.

“I say to her ‘what’s happening’, and she explains to me that she is at the station, that she has lost her bag and her phone and she asks me if I can give her my number. bank card to be able to take a train very, very quickly”, he continues, explaining that he quickly had doubts despite this extremely familiar voice. “After a while, I ask her questions: which station? She doesn’t answer me”he tells the microphone of TF1, evoking “deadlines” between the questions and the answers, but also “fluctuating intonations”.

“A latency time in interactions”

The scammer behind the mysterious call eventually hung up, but how could he impersonate the victim’s mother? According to experts, all it takes is artificial intelligence (AI) software and a few voice clips. “These voice samples are generally collected from social networks. We will have to dictate to the software what we want to say so that it transcribes it, so there will be a latency time, it is not immediate in the interactions that the scammer may have with his victim”, explains to TF1 Jean-Jaques Latour, director of the site specializing in cybersecurity expertise, “cybermalveillance.gouv”.

Thanks to advances in AI, scam attempts are increasing. Last month, it was singer Florent Pagny who denounced manipulation. “It’s my voice, it’s me speaking, but I never filmed that“, he assured, showing a video of him speaking to a fan. “Hello Catherine, I am making this little video to inform you that it is indeed me (…). And I made this video to reassure you about my identity“, said the artist in this sequence in which his image was hijacked.

In this case, the scammers managed to extract several hundred euros from one of her fans.

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For the moment, such a scam targeting an individual has never been reported in France, as Jean-Jacques Latour assures us in the columns of Free Charente who revealed this matter: “This is the first time in France that we have been publicly alerted to a cyberattack of this order.“, he says, adding that this does not mean that “it hasn’t happened already“.

However, cases have already been recorded in the United States. In the spring of 2023, an American mother had the fear of her life when she answered her phone showing an unknown number, and heard the voice of her daughter, then in snow class, “who cried and sobbed”. In a report on TF1’s 20H, she returned to this call during which she was asked for a ransom: “She was saying ‘Mom, some guys kidnapped me, help me, help me! I started screaming for help’she said. Also in this case, an artificial intelligence capable of perfectly reproducing his voice had been used by criminals. Located after the call, the teenager was doing very well and had not been kidnapped.

How to protect yourself from it?

If in doubt on the phone, experts advise asking a personal question to which only the loved one knows the answer, or calling them back directly on their phone.

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In a recent British study carried out by the bank Starling Bank, which we relay in the article linked above, 28% of those surveyed say they have been victims of such a scam in the past year. However, 46% of respondents say they have never heard of this type of scam. “It is more important than ever that people are aware of these types of scams perpetrated by fraudsters and know how to protect themselves and their loved ones from falling victim to them.“, says Lisa Grahame, head of information security at Starling Bank, in a press release.