There’s a terrifying new consumer scam happening across the country with scammers using AI to convince parents that their children have been in horrific accidents, or that they’ve been kidnapped. These types of scams are on the rise and you need to know how to protect yourself. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: There’s a terrifying new consumer scam happening across the country with scammers using AI to convince parents that their children have been in horrific accidents or they’ve been kidnapped. These types of scams are on the rise and you need to know how to protect yourself. It is one of the ugliest scams I think I’ve seen in a long time. They’re able to rip, if you have a voice, anytime they can get your voice on a video or anything like that, they rip that voice. They create the words they want. They make it sound like your child or your mother or your father’s in distress. Send money now to help ’em. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: Didn’t this happen to you?
Farron Cousins: This actually did, about two or three weeks ago, this exact scam. The one talked about in this article here, happened to me. My wife got a phone call in the morning from allegedly our son, who had been in a horrific car accident. Injured a pregnant woman because he was texting and driving and ran a stop sign. So the public defender, allegedly, gets on the phone with my wife and says, look, you gotta send me $15,000 because we gotta get him outta jail. That’s how much it is to get him out. And I will represent him. And she did talk to our son on the phone. He was crying, and he said, his voice sounds a little weird because he broke his nose in the accident. So she heard a little bit like, okay, well, it definitely does kind of sound like him. And if you factor in, oh, well, he’s got a broken nose. So yes, it’s definitely him. After a little bit of digging, obviously I know a lot of lawyers, so we’re looking in, we’re trying to find the arrest records because they update in real time here in Florida. We couldn’t find anything. So eventually we realized, through some more digging, that this was a scam. But it was hours of sheer panic that we were going through. It was hell. It was hell.
Mike Papantonio: Well, America is the number one target for it and then India, oddly enough, is second target for it. And it’s down to such a science. They have this entire scam that the parent, the been involved in an accident with a pregnant woman is very common. But there’s all kinds of variations. And whether you’re being kidnapped, whether you need money to get out of, for bail. But these things are at an all time high. But, hey, here’s the good news. The White House has put Kamala Harris in charge of solving this problem. Does that make, I’m serious, it absolutely says, in May, Vice President Kamala Harris met with the chief executives of Google and Microsoft to work through the AI scam problem. You feel any better about that?
Farron Cousins: Not exactly. But, like you said, they only need to find a video of you speaking online, which of course, between videos on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, it takes two to three seconds for these AI programs, two to three seconds of your voice, and they can replicate it and have you say anything. And there’s an instance where one parent got a call that her daughter had been, she’s in the trunk of a car kidnapped and going to Mexico, and they’re demanding a million dollars.
Mike Papantonio: They have her yelling in the background.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And it is, again, I can’t quite even vocalize it because of how horrible the experience was. And to think that some people are getting it even worse, like, I’m being kidnapped. People are gonna have heart attacks because of this.
Mike Papantonio: Of course, of course.
Farron Cousins: I mean, this is insane that this is even happening.
Mike Papantonio: One way to protect yourself is to have keywords. You know the key word. I know the key word. Your child knows the key word. Everybody in the family knows the key word. And that key word is something that you, if you don’t hear the key word, you know, it’s BS. And you hear it a couple times, you certainly know that it’s total BS. So the point being, there’s ways to protect yourself, but this is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. It’s gonna come down to the more sophisticated AI. You’re gonna have videos, videos of this child, looks like they’re wrapped up in rope, being carted off to Mexico or Saudi Arabia, wherever. And so I don’t see a quick solution to this. But one way you can protect it is to have those key words that everybody in the family knows. And then once you hear that and the other way, there’s ways to track it and stop it. And it just takes a little bit of research to figure out how do you get these folks. A lot of times it’s people just right in the neighborhood. It’s somebody right around you who knows enough about your life to know the things that you’re gonna react to.
