I've made videos about all sorts of scams, but this is probably the most evil one I've
seen yet. And even worse, it's tricky enough where even the smartest people,
like you watching this video, are at risk for it, unless you know about it and how to
spot it. Which I'll explain. So what is the scam? Well it's called virtual kidnapping.
I've actually mentioned it before, but figured it really deserves its own video. And there's
two main types of these I would say, a low tech and a newer high tech version that you
especially have to be watching out for. The high tech version involves a scammer
using brand new and easily accessible voice cloning technology to literally steal your
voice and spoof your phone number, then use that to scam your friends and family.
And in some of the worst ways possible too. And you can imagine, if someone
gets a phone call seemingly from someone they know's number, and when they pick up,
it's their voice, the possibilities are endless for where they could go
with this scam and trick someone into doing something. So the exact technique will vary,
but always at the end, they're going to end up asking you for money.
A lot of times this involves them saying that you're in jail and you need bail money. But the
scariest way is they'll call up friends and family pretending to be you in some kind of
urgent distress, such as you're actively being kidnapped, and you're with the hostage taker.
Now with the low tech version of the scam, which I'll explain later, it basically just
involves someone in the background pretending to be you, but you can't really hear them very well.
The scammer just says that it's the person you know. But with the latest technology,
with just a few seconds of voice sample, they can literally clone your voice and
then use that to say whatever they want. Now at this very moment,
I believe that to get a good cloned voice, it takes about 30 seconds of sample voice,
but to get something that's passable enough over the phone, probably a lot less than that.
But there already are new techniques that just aren't public yet that really do just
take a couple of seconds, like this one researched by Microsoft. I'll put the link
in the description if you want to check it out. The samples and examples are really crazy. And
you better believe that a technique like that will be easily available for anyone very soon.
I would guess within one year. You might be thinking, "Well,
where are they going to get a sample of my voice from?" Well possibly your voicemail
for starters. And if you post anything online, even one video could be enough.
A lot of times if you're at some kind of conference, maybe you do some speaking or
even some public conference call or something like that could be used.
And for someone like me, well I guess I'm just beyond help. But even still, just like you, the
main thing I can do is to make sure that everyone I know knows about this scam, so they'll be on
guard for it. Now before I continue with the low tech, but still very effective variation of the
scam, I want to thank today's sponsor Bitdefender and their product Bitdefender Premium Security.
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Alright now onto the low-tech variation of the scam, which is still very popular
because it still is effective. In this one, basically there will probably be two scammers,
one kind of in the background and one on the phone. The one in the background will
pretend to be your loved one or friend, and they won't really be very audible.
You'll only be able to hear them pretending to cry and scream and stuff like that,
while the scammer on the phone will be yelling at you trying to keep the pressure up. While
on the call, they will go to great lengths to get you to not hang up the call. They don't
want you calling anyone else or calling back the person and realizing that it was a spoofed call.
And they'll use the usual scare tactics like, "Don't hang up, don't call the police,
or don't tell anyone, or I'm going to hurt them even more", stuff like that. In this one,
they're simply trying to scare you as much as possible and will hurl every
threat imaginable at you, unless you of course pay up with this fake ransom.
So knowing about the scam, if you ever do get a call like this, there are actually a
few ways you can relatively easily check and verify that it is fake. One thing you could
do is send a text message to the phone, and of course the scammer won't get it. So you can say,
"Read back the text I sent, or I'm not going to give you anything."
And of course the scammer will just lobby more threats at you. But of course, if they were real,
then they'd want to get paid. They'd probably just do it to verify it's real. Also if you
have another phone line or someone near you that can also call the friend separately,
you could do that. You could even test the scammer and say, "Hey,
I'm going to hang up and call back to make sure this isn't spoofed.
And if you're the real deal, I'll pay you double." And I mean,
what scammer wouldn't want to go for that kind of deal? But of course they won't.
They'll want you to not hang up under any circumstance. But only rely on this hang
up and call back method if you are on a cell phone, not a landline, because
there is another type of scam called a delayed disconnect scam that I've talked about before.
Basically how this works, is with some phone companies, if it's on a landline,
if you hang up the phone, but the person on the other end doesn't hang up the phone,
then it will keep the call connected. So when you pick up the phone again to dial again, you'll
still be talking to that person and not realize it. But that doesn't happen on a cell phone.
And I'll put that link popping up at the top if you haven't seen it already. It's
definitely really interesting. And there's plenty of other strategies
that scammers may use in conjunction with these types of scams. For example,
they'll look on social media and may target people specifically on vacation. Because you know,
for a lot of people, if they travel out of the country, you know their friends and family are
going to be sort of on edge and worried about their safety a little bit in the first place.
So if someone gets a phone call from someone they know is on vacation and
they say they've been kidnapped, well, they might just be scared enough to believe it. Or
they may not even impersonate friends and family. They may impersonate your boss or
another coworker and say, "Hey, I need you to transfer this money for an invoice payment.
Just send it to this bank account and it'll be good." So what are the best ways to
protect against these types of scams going into the future? Well, the biggest one is simply tell
everyone you know about it. I think a lot of people have not realized just how advanced AI
is becoming and so fast. I mean this was not even possible even a few months ago.
So I bet a lot of people are going to be caught off guard, not just for this scam, but ones
we can't even imagine yet. You may also want to come up with an emergency password that only you
and your friends know. I think that's probably been some good advice even in the past years,
even just as a way to alert friends and family that something's wrong without making it obvious.
And third, kind of related to this, I should mention if you have any services you use,
like banks that have that voice verification feature, I would go and disable that immediately
because it is no longer secure at all. There's already been articles of people
who cloned their own voice and it was able to easily bypass any kind of voice verification.
Doesn't work anymore. So really just be aware of this new AI technology and always be suspicious
if someone asks you to send them money, no matter who it is. Why don't you let me know
down in the comments if you or anyone you know has ever come across this scam in real life,
or maybe in the future you'll be watching this and it's a super common thing, who knows.
And thanks again to Bitdefender for sponsoring this video. Be sure to visit the link in the
description and check out Bitdefender Premium Security to protect your devices. If you want
to keep watching, the next video I recommend is right here, where I talk about a new credit card
scam that involves the contactless or tap to pay feature a lot of credit cards have.
So definitely check that out and thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next one.