A Mom Was Convinced Her Daughter Was Kidnapped After Hearing Her Voice

Arizona mom Jennifer DeStefano had the scare of a lifetime when she was told recently that her 15-year-old daughter was being held hostage. She told local news outlet KPHO that she fully believed she was speaking to her daughter on the phone. “It was completely her voice,” she told the outlet in a video interview. She was told by a man on the phone that she would need to pay $1 million for her daughter to be released, or else he would take her across the border to Mexico. It was all a lie. This kidnapping scammer used AI to replicate her daughter’s voice so perfectly that DeStefano never questioned it.

DeStefano explained in her interview that she answered a call from an unknown number when she heard a voice she believed was her daughter’s sobbing on the phone. “I pick up the phone and I hear my daughter’s voice, and it says, ‘Mom!’ and she’s sobbing,” DeStefano said. “I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘Mom, I messed up,’ and she’s sobbing and crying.” She was absolutely positive this was the voice of her daughter. “It was completely her voice. It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried,” DeStefano explained.

A man took over the call from there and told the distraught mom, “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.”

The man on the phone demanded $1 million to return her daughter, but when DeStefano explained she didn’t have that much money, dropped the price to $50,000. Fortunately the terrified mom was at her other daughter’s dance studio where other parents heard what was going on. One mom contacted 911 while another phoned her husband. They were able to confirm her daughter was safe, and she hung up on the caller, who police believe used AI software to clone her daughter’s voice.

Kidnapping scams like these have become more and more common as AI technology evolves, warns the National Institute of Health. There are several indicators that these calls are scams, according to the NIH:

• The call comes from an outside area code
• They go to great lengths to keep you on the phone
• Caller tries to prevent you from locating the “kidnapped” victim
• They only want ransom money via wire transfer.

To avoid being scammed, the NIH recommends keeping the scammer on the phone while trying to locate the supposed victim with another phone or on social media. Ask for the victim to call you from their own phone. And sadly, with the advent of AI technology, don’t trust your ears.

“You can no longer trust your ears,” Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University specializing in AI, told Arizona CBS News Channel 5. “Most of the voice cloning actually captures the inflection as well as the emotion. Obviously, if you spoke in your normal voice, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to clone how you might sound when you’re upset, but if I also had three seconds of your upset voice, then all bets are off.”