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Fran Lu

Fraudsters in China are using artificial intelligence (AI) to clone people’s voices and scam their relatives and friends.
Police in central China’s Hubei province recently revealed a case in which an elderly woman was tricked by an AI-generated version of her grandson.
The woman, surnamed Liu, told China Central Television that she received the phone call from her grandson’s home landline on April 28.
Liu said he was sobbing and told her he had injured someone’s head in a supermarket. The injured person had been hospitalised and was demanding 20,000 yuan (US$2,800) in compensation.
He said he was in a police station and needed the money to be released.
He also begged her not to tell his mother; otherwise he would “jump from a building”.

Liu said she immediately comforted her grandson, but when she asked him which police station he was at, he suddenly hung up.
She quickly borrowed cash from relatives and friends and waited for him to call her again, as she dared not notify his parents or his school.
Her grandson called her again and told her his classmate’s father would collect money at a place 20 minutes away from her home. The boy said he would call the father’s mobile phone to let her know he was the correct person.
Liu said she picked up the call on the collector’s phone and heard her “grandson” telling her, “Give him the money.”
She thought the case was well settled and did not talk to any other family members about it.
A few days later, when her grandson visited her, she asked him about the case, and it was then that she realised she had been scammed.
She called the police, who discovered that another elderly woman had fallen into the same trap just a few days ago.
After viewing surveillance footage from the street, officers realised that it was the same man who collected money from the two other victims involved in the case.
The man, surnamed Zhang, said he thought he was only working on a profitable part-time job, which paid him 1,000 yuan (US$140) a day.
He received instructions from the scam gang to pick up the money from the victims and deliver it to a location where a gang member would come to collect the money.
Liu told the police that the voice from the phone call sounded exactly like her grandson.
Her grandson said he received many crank calls at her home before the scam. He asked who was calling, but no one ever answered.

The police revealed that it was a new trick played by scammers.
They used AI to clone the voice of the victims from the crank calls and then called their family and friends using the cloned voice.
They also deliberately call landlines that are still in use in some elderly people’s homes to make it difficult for victims to verify the calls.
Many AI apps have a voice cloning feature, which only costs a few dozen yuan to copy each person.
“Shame on these scammers, profiting from elderly people’s love for their grandchildren,” said one online observer.
Another person said he had been using an AI assistant to answer phone calls from strangers to avoid scams: “I am beating magic with magic.”
“The technology is evolving so fast that laws are urgently needed to regulate it,” another said.


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Nighttime con gang targets vulnerable in elderly homes where landline phones remain prevalent, victims think loved one urgently needs cash


Nighttime con gang targets vulnerable in elderly homes where landline phones remain prevalent, victims think loved one urgently needs cash.


Scams and swindles

China phone crooks use AI-cloning for scam, make crank calls to get real voice for copying

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Nighttime con gang targets vulnerable in elderly homes where landline phones remain prevalent, victims think loved one urgently needs cash

Nighttime con gang targets vulnerable in elderly homes where landline phones remain prevalent, victims think loved one urgently needs cash