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My neighbour is a detective and did a course on crypto scams. He told me scammers call someone's cell phone, record their voicemail greeting and use that to clo

by giarc 2y ago

My neighbour is a detective and did a course on crypto scams. He told me scammers call someone's cell phone, record their voicemail greeting and use that to clone their voice. Then can then have a very real life conversation with their grandparent and take their money. I'm all for innovation, but I don't really see the use case of cloning random voices to make podcasts? Listening to Zuck interview Elon? ok...?

eurekin 2y ago
Technically, wouldn't a simple "Hold on, I'll call you back" test call stop that?
- stitched2gethr 2y ago
  Yes, if the callee has reason to believe the caller isn't who they say they are. But this will never enter the mind of someone who's retirement age.
- bagels 2y ago
  Some old people become very gullible.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    In all fairness, the number of old people who even know that realistic recreations of their loved ones voices is even possible is probably pretty low.
- a2128 2y ago
  Scammers will use pressure and emotion. "Grandpa they put me in jail, I need you to bail me out please, there's not much time!" The last thing on the victim's mind is to hang up on what sounds like their crying distressed grandson to call them back. Sometimes even calling back won't work, the real grandson isn't picking up their phone and the scammer is saying that it's because they're in jail and their phone was taken.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - pmarreck 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - wat10000 2y ago
        [flagged]
        pmarreck 2y ago
        I read the entire thing. My point was that mental capacity and acuity (including the ability to resist panic scamming) go down especially after 80, and gullibility goes up. No matter how smart you were prior. And that this is a vulnerability for everyone. In 2023, Americans aged 60 and older reported losses exceeding $3.4 billion due to scams, marking an 11% increase from the previous year. The median loss in a romance scam for ages 70 and older is $9,000. And now there's also pig-butchering. When combined with isolation and a lack of digital literacy, everyone's older family members are vulnerable.
        wat10000 2y ago
        And my point is that coming up with ways for a fully calm, collected, reasonable person to detect a scammer is a waste of time, because that’s the easy part. The hard part is being calm, collected, and reasonable enough to actually consider that you might be getting scammed. And that is hard. For most people, extremely hard. For people who lived most of their lives before the era of cheap and fast worldwide communication, it’s even worse. For people with declining mental abilities, it’s worse yet. Saying “oh you can expose the scam just by saying you’ll call them back” is looking at the wrong thing. So yeah, you’re making a great point that meshes well with my own and definitely does not deserve to be wrapped in snideness.
alias_neo 2y ago
It's really easy for a technical person to do as well. I use Coqui TTS[0] as part of my home automation, I wrote a small python script that lets me upload a voice clip for it to clone after I got the idea from HeyWillow[1], and a small shim that lets me send the output to a Home Assistant media player instead of using their standard output device. I run the TTS container on a VM with a Tesla P4 (~£100 to buy) and get about 1x-2x (roughly the same time it'd take to say it, to process) using the large model. Just for a giggle, I uploaded a few 3s-5s second clip of myself speaking and cloned my voice, then executed a command to our living room media player to call my wife into the room; from another room, she was 100% convinced it was myself speaking words I'd never spoken. I tried playing with a variety of sentences for a few hours and overall, it sounded almost exactly like me, to me, with the exception of some "attitude" and "intonation" I know I wouldn't use in my speech. I didn't notice much of an improvement using much longer clips; the short ones were "good enough". Tangentially, it really bugs me that most phone providers in the UK insist you record a "personal greeting" now before they'll let you check your voice mail box, I just record silence, because the last thing I want/need is a voicemail greeting in my voice confirming to some randomer I didn't want calling me, who I am and that my number is active, even more so knowing how I can clone any voice to a reasonably good accuracy with just a few seconds of audio. [0] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [1] https://heywillow.io/ https://heywillow.io/
mensetmanusman 2y ago
The best thing about crypto is that it is an ever growing bug bounty program for all aspects of authentication :)

by giarc 2y ago

eurekin 2y ago

Technically, wouldn't a simple "Hold on, I'll call you back" test call stop that?

stitched2gethr 2y ago
Yes, if the callee has reason to believe the caller isn't who they say they are. But this will never enter the mind of someone who's retirement age.
bagels 2y ago
Some old people become very gullible.
- Loughla 2y ago
  In all fairness, the number of old people who even know that realistic recreations of their loved ones voices is even possible is probably pretty low.
a2128 2y ago
Scammers will use pressure and emotion. "Grandpa they put me in jail, I need you to bail me out please, there's not much time!" The last thing on the victim's mind is to hang up on what sounds like their crying distressed grandson to call them back. Sometimes even calling back won't work, the real grandson isn't picking up their phone and the scammer is saying that it's because they're in jail and their phone was taken.
- wat10000 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - wat10000 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - pmarreck 2y ago
        I read the entire thing. My point was that mental capacity and acuity (including the ability to resist panic scamming) go down especially after 80, and gullibility goes up. No matter how smart you were prior. And that this is a vulnerability for everyone. In 2023, Americans aged 60 and older reported losses exceeding $3.4 billion due to scams, marking an 11% increase from the previous year. The median loss in a romance scam for ages 70 and older is $9,000. And now there's also pig-butchering. When combined with isolation and a lack of digital literacy, everyone's older family members are vulnerable.
        wat10000 2y ago
        And my point is that coming up with ways for a fully calm, collected, reasonable person to detect a scammer is a waste of time, because that’s the easy part. The hard part is being calm, collected, and reasonable enough to actually consider that you might be getting scammed. And that is hard. For most people, extremely hard. For people who lived most of their lives before the era of cheap and fast worldwide communication, it’s even worse. For people with declining mental abilities, it’s worse yet. Saying “oh you can expose the scam just by saying you’ll call them back” is looking at the wrong thing. So yeah, you’re making a great point that meshes well with my own and definitely does not deserve to be wrapped in snideness.

alias_neo 2y ago

It's really easy for a technical person to do as well. I use Coqui TTS[0] as part of my home automation, I wrote a small python script that lets me upload a voice clip for it to clone after I got the idea from HeyWillow[1], and a small shim that lets me send the output to a Home Assistant media player instead of using their standard output device. I run the TTS container on a VM with a Tesla P4 (~£100 to buy) and get about 1x-2x (roughly the same time it'd take to say it, to process) using the large model. Just for a giggle, I uploaded a few 3s-5s second clip of myself speaking and cloned my voice, then executed a command to our living room media player to call my wife into the room; from another room, she was 100% convinced it was myself speaking words I'd never spoken. I tried playing with a variety of sentences for a few hours and overall, it sounded almost exactly like me, to me, with the exception of some "attitude" and "intonation" I know I wouldn't use in my speech. I didn't notice much of an improvement using much longer clips; the short ones were "good enough". Tangentially, it really bugs me that most phone providers in the UK insist you record a "personal greeting" now before they'll let you check your voice mail box, I just record silence, because the last thing I want/need is a voicemail greeting in my voice confirming to some randomer I didn't want calling me, who I am and that my number is active, even more so knowing how I can clone any voice to a reasonably good accuracy with just a few seconds of audio. [0] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [1] https://heywillow.io/ https://heywillow.io/

mensetmanusman 2y ago

The best thing about crypto is that it is an ever growing bug bounty program for all aspects of authentication :)