Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal recently had to share a rather close-to-home experience where scammers cloned his voice using AI to try to dupe him into making a fraudulent money transfer. Sharing an experience with the NDTV World Summit, Mittal said that an executive was called by scammers mimicking his voice and demanded an enormous amount of money.
Fortunately, the executive was alerted and saw through the scam, avoiding what would have been a huge financial loss. Mittal said he was “dumbstruck” to hear the recording of the voice, which sounded so much like his own that it underscored how convincingly imitative AI voice duplicates can be.
NEW AI technologies can be misused, such as voice cloning and deep fakes, in scams, according to Mittal. He said the next thing fraudsters will look to steal from individuals soon are digital signatures and even face cloning for video calls. While conceding to the threats posed by AI, Mittal insisted that positive aspects of AI need to be tapped in, saying societies have to adopt AI to not get left behind in the ‘techno-race’; though at the same time he said there is a need to balance leverage for harnessing benefits of AI with necessary safeguarding against the risks it poses.
With AI-generated deep fakes and voice cloning gaining momentum, scams are also becoming too smart for even the most tech-savvy persons to trace fraud. Frauds blend snippets of audio clipped from social media by scamming family members or colleagues into sending money, thus creating convincing voice replicas. One such disturbing example is the “digital arrest” scam, in which scammers do not actually pose like enforcement officers but go about their business masquerading as law enforcement officials by video or audio calls and blackmail victims into making payments with a threat of legal consequences.
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