Artificial intelligence has made the grandparent scam, where fraudsters pretend to be a loved one in trouble, that much trickier. Now, scammers can clone the voice of your family members and use it to get you to open up your wallet.
The grandparent scam is decades old: a call from a grandchild in trouble, needing money before anybody else finds out. What voice cloning changes is the one thing that used to break it, which is that the voice was wrong. A few seconds of audio from a public video is now enough. CBC's Marketplace followed a Canadian senior who was almost taken this way and was stopped at the bank counter. Canadians reported losing close to three million dollars to the scam in 2024. It sits at the other end of the page from Arup's 25 million dollar deepfake board call, and the technique is the same one: a familiar voice, an urgent reason, and no second channel to check it against. The defence is also the same, and it is Ferrari's: ask something only the real person could answer.
