The voice was convincing.
The caller identified himself as police, but then another voice came on the line.
“He goes, ‘Hi Grandma. Yeah, I got in trouble here. The police say they need some money to release me or they’re going to keep me in jail,'” Kevin Crawford recalls.
His mother, Marilyn, had just been awakened by the call. And the Ontario senior was certain it was her grandson, Ian, on the phone.
She was told he’d been arrested for stealing a car and that he needed $9,000 sent to police for his release.
Only, it wasn’t Ian. It was a scam phone call so convincing that Kevin and Marilyn wonder if fraudsters used artificial intelligence to clone Ian’s voice.
And Crawford says that even though the voice sounded slightly different, it convinced her enough to agree to pay up.
“I was anxious to get the money out; I’d do anything for my grandchildren,” she said of the conversation from 2021.
It’s known broadly as the “emergency” or “grandparent” scam: the caller claims to be the victim’s grandchild and is in the middle of a crisis, usually saying that a crime has been committed — and they need money. They instruct the grandparent or intended victim to tell no one.
And it’s been a successful ploy; Canadians reported losing nearly $3 million to this scam in 2024, according to figures from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
The rise of deepfakes in scamming
In the U.S., the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network sounded the alarm in a November 2024 report, warning that such “highly realistic” deepfakes “can manufacture what appear to be real events, such as a person doing or saying something they did not actually do or say.”
The report flags the same family emergency scheme experienced by Crawford in which “scammers may use deepfake voices or videos to impersonate a victim’s family member, friend, or other trusted individual.”
David Common’s voice gets cloned by retired CIA officer
Experts suggest that using AI to impersonate someone is happening more often, according to the anecdotes at a global fraud conference convened by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners in 2024. Thousands of investigators and other officials discussed how the rise of artificial intelligence can be useful in investigations but that it’s also used proficiently by scammers to target the most vulnerable — and use their own social media posts against them.
Keith Elliott, a certified fraud examiner and private investigator, says it’s remarkably easy because people unwittingly supply fraudsters with vast amounts of personal information.
Personal video posts, even those years old, are being harvested by scammers, who then use AI to replicate the voices.
“In the old days, you wouldn’t have put a filing cabinet on your front lawn and said, ‘Have a look.’ Now we’ve put it all out there on social media for everybody to see — what I had for lunch, what I had for breakfast, when my kids graduate. And we’re all guilty of it.”
Retired CIA officer Peter Warmka calls AI a “playground” for scammers.
“You need three to five seconds of a [voice] sample. You can get it from a social media post. You can get it from a phone call. And the scammers can make off with five [thousand], 10 [thousand], 15 [thousand], $100,000, $200,000 … because [the victim] believes it’s somebody that it’s not.”
How to protect yourself
Warmka suggests having a code word or phrase with family and friends, so the next time the phone rings, you can test who’s on the other line.
When Crawford got the call, she didn’t know to ask those types of questions. And within 30 minutes, a taxi had arrived for her, sent by the scammers, and drove her to a nearby CIBC branch in Oshawa, Ont.
Luckily for her, an astute customer service agent flagged the transaction. Minutes later, a financial advisor contacted her son before any money was transferred.
“I was just sick. I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “[It’s] the worst thing that could ever happen to anybody.”
After his mother’s experience with the emergency scam, Kevin Crawford has a message for those using sophisticated technology to take advantage of seniors.
“I hate these people [who] target vulnerable people,” Crawford said. “They’re taking thousands and thousands of dollars … [Seniors] can’t afford to pay out the money. That’s their retirement.”
