A new global study from McAfee is revealing the staggering human and financial cost of AI voice-cloning scams, finding that the vast majority of people who receive these calls lose money.
In a survey of 7,000 people worldwide, McAfee finds that one in four had experienced an AI voice-cloning scam or knew someone who had.
Of those who received a message from an AI voice clone, 77% say they lost money as a result. McAfee says 36% of victims lost between $500 and $3,000, while 7% lost between $5,000 and $15,000.
According to McAfee, AI has made fake voices nearly indistinguishable from real ones.
“With a small sample of a person’s voice and a script cooked up by a cybercriminal, these voice clone messages sound convincing. 70% of people in our worldwide survey said they weren’t confident they could tell the difference between a cloned voice and the real thing.”
McAfee says nearly half of all survey respondents say they would reply to a voicemail or voice message purporting to be from a friend or loved one in need of money, particularly if the request appeared to come from their partner or spouse at 40%, their mother at 24% or their child at 20%.
The scenarios most likely to prompt a response are a car accident at 48%, being robbed at 47%, losing a phone or wallet at 43%, and needing help while traveling abroad at 41%.
McAfee says cybercriminals typically source personal details from public social media profiles before crafting targeted messages and almost always request payment through methods that are difficult to trace or recover, including gift cards, wire transfers, reloadable debit cards and cryptocurrency.
“Requests for these kinds of payments raise a major red flag. It could very well be a scam.”
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