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1) voice one: young adult calls, sobbing 2) grandparent inquires with a name... "Ben, is that you?" 3) voice one: "Yes grandma, it's me, Ben... I'm in trouble, please don't tell mom 4) voice two: "Hello, I'm attorney..."
My grandmother fell victim to this almost 20 years ago, which only stopped when Western Union refused to let her continue sending wires... she was forced to call her daughter (at which point they just called my brother.)
Our takeaway (at the time)... the voice doesn't even need to be terribly accurate, since the original interaction is brief / somewhat inaudible over the tears. Typically just requires an older vulnerable adult, a lucky strike with the initial setup (e.g. grandparent actually has a grandkid), and a lot of high pressure / duress salesmanship.
> cybercrime losses across the United States rose 26 per cent in a single year
> The FBI was candid that even these figures understate the problem. AI attribution in the report reflects only what victims recognised and reported, and most victims of a cloned-voice call never learn that a machine was involved at all.
> INTERPOL found that AI-enhanced fraud is roughly four and a half times more profitable than its traditional equivalent, and that so-called agentic AI systems can now autonomously plan and execute entire fraud campaigns, from reconnaissance through to the ransom demand.
I hope they got the message.
this way, you do not footgun yourself in the event you'd ever need to ask something. Money isnt the only thing they can ask, and no one (i think) has a glass orb to tell their future and know for certain such a call would never happen. its easy to think it wont happen to you, i think that is most peoples' sentiment until it does. (having a need for help from family that is)
"Before you send anything to anyone, ever, call them back. Doesn't matter if it's me, the bank, a lawyer, whatever... tell them 'hang on I have another call coming in, let me just call you back in a few minutes, okay?'"
People aren't prepared for this shit.
Talking on the phone is now an unmitigated liability.
LPT: Please have a codeword or phrase that you use with your loved ones so even if the scammers use your voice, they won't know the phrase.
They keep refusing ideas like these on the grounds of them being “not stupid” and “able to see through such attempts immediately, 100% of the time” and “do you think we’re stupid?”
> Every article published on SmarterArticles is authored and editorially controlled by Tim Green. Artificial intelligence tools are used within a structured and supervised workflow as research and drafting instruments. All arguments, framing decisions, source selections, and final publication choices remain human-directed and under my full responsibility.
There are references at the bottom, but I would have preferred direct links or footnotes within the article. Also, direct quotes are nice. I didn’t notice any glaring AI cliches.
This has become the highbrow way of admitting that AI is writing the articles: Calling it “drafting” is another way of saying that the article was written by AI and the person publishing it maybe reviewed it. Maybe they skimmed it and published it directly.
For what it’s worth the article felt obviously AI heavy to my first read.
I don't think that's a safe assumption. You could construct an article pretty quickly if you had a topic, a few points to hit, a conclusion and a short list of links, then fed that to the machine. All the LLM would be doing is fluffing it up with worthless words, unnecessary metaphors and maybe a pop culture reference or two so it looks like what people expect from an "article."
"Rewrite this as a slate dot com article"
If it were an email newsletter instead, there wouldn't be that fluffy expectation and you could just leave the bullet points and links as they were.
We’re not disagreeing? That’s basically what I said: The AI wrote the article. Saying it drafted the article is a way of admitting it was written by AI but making it sound like it was actually a journalistic endeavor.
> No human had. The crying had been synthesised from a fragment of audio, and the daughter she thought she was rescuing existed only as a pattern of numbers in someone else's machine.
>and it is worth being clear about why
>The emotional mechanism the scam exploits is not a gap in knowledge that a leaflet can fill; it is the love a person has for their grandchild, weaponised
>These are not the numbers of a credulous minority being separated from pocket money. They are the numbers of a generation's accumulated savings being drained
>that a fraud requiring the absolute frontier of machine learning can be perpetrated against an ordinary grandmother in her kitchen, at scale, for the price of nothing
(To be clear this isn't automatically disqualifying to me. But I am interested in LLM writing patterns and my ability to detect them. And in the case of this article I sense the kind of linguistic padding that has made Claude a little harder to work with in the more recent Opus point releases because it obscures the most important bits of information.)
Not saying that "there's nothing we can do" or anything, but it does feel like this is one of those instincts that you develop growing up with the internet. Like, my first instinct reading that (and I hope getting that call) would be "what the hell is the lawyer doing at the scene". You have to treat _everything_ coming through your phone as potentially untrusted. I don't have any data on this, but it feels like my friends, and especially younger people, do that automatically.
The primary defence against all phishing is to tell yourself: nothing is ever really that urgent. Nothing is ever that good.
As the cost goes down to near-zero you can scale it up almost infinitely, especially if the profits are high enough to get some smart people working on the problem, which going by the article is already the case ("INTERPOL's finding that AI-enhanced fraud is four and a half times more profitable than the traditional kind"; incidents rose by 26% last year). If AI does succeed on mutilating white collar work enough there will be a large supply of knowledge workers that might just join International Scam Co. rather than have their families go homeless. Drowning man clutching at straw and all.
So if technologically it's impossible to prevent and societally it's impossible to prevent (like the attorney that got pwned same as the grandma), I'm not sure if there exists an answer that isn't worse than the thing it's supposed to prevent. I suppose we'll soon be in a situation where nothing we don't directly perceive in real life is provably true. That journalism and media in general seem to be in a deep crisis of trustworthiness means that you won't even get the benefit of the chain-of-trust as a proxy for whether something is or isn't real.
Ignoring everything happening outside of your immediate surroundings is a choice, and probably even good for people's mental health, but my gut feeling is that it does make humanity as a whole dumber and disempowered. What does corruption matter if nobody cares, or even hears about it? It was AI generated by $current_enemy anyway; nothing to see here, citizen.
Well, not completely unsolvable. But nobody would like the solution.
What all these scams rely on is a way to transfer money in an irrevocable fashion. Restrict that in meaningful ways and you end a lot of the abilities for these scams to operate.
You could, for example, outlaw gift cards as a start. You could force the likes of Western Union to have a holding period before releasing money. Crypto would be hard as any regulation against it is pretty easily circumvented, but you could outlaw crypto currency exchanges (I'd worry less about crypto though as it's pretty hard for grandma to reliably setup).
Difficulty in setting up a money transfer is not a hindrance. I have heard stories of scammers walking someone through the entire process to getting a mortgage on a house on the A&E Intervention episode of Greg. If they think you have money and they think you are gullible, they will devote time and effort to getting it.
There's a reason scammers rely heavily on things like gift cards, it's because hiring mules is expensive and creates a trail police can follow back to the scammers. It requires them to be in the same locale as the person they are scamming. Mailing cash is also pretty dicey for the scammers because you have to send the mail to a valid address. That becomes something police can trace.
If you wanted to completely eliminate scams then yeah, you'd also outlaw cash.
High schools should teach how to spot a scam. As others have observed, this is not a new one, it's just gotten more high-tech and convincing. This is one of many practical things our schools should teach about that they just don't.
These scumbags send grandma to a Bitcoin ATM.
“Grandma the password is ‘Integra’ but I can just tell you now, it’s not me calling you, it must be a sca—“
“Thanks got it byeeeeee” <scammer calls grandma>
Take Europe for example: nobody dies of hunger in Europe. And yet there are plenty of thieves. People stealing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of EUR aren't doing it to "feed their families".
Think of the situation today. Think of the victims today. Instead of thinking of tomorrow's hypothetical situation where supposedly all the honest fathers out of work would join the crime syndicate, think of today's victims.
Projecting your own insecurity about the future to excuse scummy behavior by the scum of this earth is of no help.
There are people, right now, who have a roof. Who have a family. And who are fucking scums stealing the hard earned money of others because they choosed the easy life of crime.
Zero tolerance for such motherfuckers. I care about the victims and you should too.
Nobody? France, as the most extreme example, has a rate of 1.52 per 100K. That's about a thousand people a year. That is certainly a small percentage of the population, but it isn't "nobody".
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit...
Eh, maybe.
Some of those may be hospice-style scenarios, where starvation is technically the cause of death at times. https://www.ccjm.org/content/ccjom/70/6/548.full.pdf
Obviously there are people who help themselves to others' money if given the chance no matter the circumstances. But if the circumstances change so that people DO start going hungry or homeless, which is a rather obvious side effect of AI-but-not-AGI maximalism brightly espoused by our overlords sama and amodei of the "I can’t wait to make half the knowledge workers worldwide obsolete" variety, the scale of the problem will obviously get worse, as well as the type of people you can get involved if you’re in the international scam market.
> fucking scums
> Zero tolerance for such motherfuckers
Who watches the watchers etc.
We will just end up with some jingoist dude that will go after us instead.
Slow reforms to regulate the banking industry with this "identity theft" nonsense...
It doesn't even have to be based on watermarking. It could be as simple as, "hold on a sec your AI countermeasure was listening and noticed you got this suspicious call, please be aware this may be a scam. Here is what you should do next..."
It should be illegal to "impersonate" a human voice.
Inspired by this headline I saw in the news today... haven't read the full article yet: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/now-defenders-are-e...
Another pillar of basic trust that's being eroded on an industrial scale. Sigh.
Article said the imposter in this case claimed her phone had been confiscated.
Fraudsters tend to also plan things such that the impersonated person can't be reached by phone at that time, either by choosing a time when they somehow know they're unavailable (e.g. impersonated person posted on social media they're boarding a plane) or in one case (12 years ago though) my SIL's parent's landline was bombarded with spam calls until they decided to leave the phone off the hook at which point the scammers phoned bank who couldn't reach the parents on their main line, of course this was the bank's problem (and there was probably an inside person facilitating) so they got their money back, but still a major inconvenience for the victim.
Probably the only sure advice is to be exceptionally wary of phone calls with supposed extreme time pressures to send the money now.
Quick note: you mean “wary” instead of “weary” there.
Remember, trust is like a rainforest: takes a long time to grow, provides a valuable ecosystem essential to human life, but can also be burned down for a quick profit.
Yes, having a secret code is probably the right answer. My wife's family always has, but mine doesn't. I suppose we should probably fix that.
and receiving more.
As 99% of the time these are spam calls, I used to respond with something like "I'm fine, but who are you / do I know you?", but that was pretty much always inefficient as that might say their name (which from a spammer is useless information), maybe a sales pitch "how much do you spend on x?" or maybe something deliberately misleading about their company and saying something like <major brand name> even though they're some independent sales crowd getting commission selling contracts for them.
Eventually I found that the most effective response is "Sorry. Where are you calling from and what is this in regard to?" which I've found without fail seems to surprise, disarm them and immediately elicit whether the call is a waste of my time. At which point I either become very friendly (because it's a call I'm expecting) or I simply respond with "Sorry, not interested, goodbye." and immediately put down the phone.
I just want the disruption to be as minimal as possible and to not let myself even get an emotional reaction from it, so I don't want to get annoyed at them, never mind wasting time telling them off, besides, I suspect that my ruthlessly efficient getting rid of them without them even having a chance to try their pitch is received as a super cold shoulder, akin to being told to f-off.
This is a good reminder that we should review that, since its been 10 years or so.
Fun.
(never heard of anyone actually using that in real life, sounds uttery insane)
Kinda crazy
https://www.schwab.com/voice-id
So... This has to be a Sneakers reference, right?
Uh? Surely this makes believing the victims easy not hard to believe.
Its like revenge porn. "It's not me. It's a deepfake" is easy to believe.
Heavy sigh. The “weapon” is software. It cannot be regulated unless we live in the fascist dystopia where I have to ask the governments approval to run any piece of software.
Now in the era of AI, this means anyone in the vicinity of an officer has a voice sample in the public domain, plus potentially their image.
Complex issue. I like body cams, I like freedom of information laws, but don't love this particular outcome.
But more generally while recordings might be copyrighted, the voice itself isn’t so copying a voice isn’t a crime, at least as it currently stands. You cannot however use said voice for deceptive practices. You can however for advertisement (needs permission). And in the US you can for satire, at least in the US, withOUT permission (falls under the 1st amendment).