Member Article

Is your business safe from voice cloning fraud?

Voice cloning is the new big thing and due to recent advances in AI computer generated audio is now said to be unnervingly exact. So unsurprisingly, it is now being used to commit fraud.

The software can pick up not just your accent - but your timbre, pitch, pace, flow of speaking and your breathing. The cloned voice can also be tweaked to portray any required emotion - such as anger, fear, happiness, love or boredom.

Once it took hours of voice recording to clone someone’s voice - now all it needs is five seconds - less than most people have on their phone answering machine recordings. Not to mention the number of videos that people post to their social media feeds. Scary stuff!

And as a result of its accuracy, and the ease of procuring just five seconds of voice material, unsurprisingly voice cloning is being very quickly adopted by fraudsters as a means to commit identify fraud.

For instance, one example is a new property scam doing the rounds where fraudsters imitate solicitors and manage to scam home buyers out of their exchange deposit, which is now often much higher than 10 per cent of the property being bought. The level of con is so advanced that one family was asked by their bank to confirm the payment and called their solicitors using the number advertised on the website and were unaware that they were in fact talking to the people who were executing the fraud.

Fraudsters are also using voice cloning to trick the voice recognition systems used by many companies, such as banks, as a customer identifier. The issue is that this is not just for ‘live’ accounts, but for dormant ones too, defined as accounts that have not been touched for over three years - often these are the accounts of people that have passed away which went undetected by the executors. And of course, with many people now keeping the social media pages of deceased loved ones open as memorials, there is often enough content for fraudsters to use in order to steal their identity.

Identity fraud is a growing crime and deceased identity fraud is one of the fastest growing areas because typically it goes undetected for longer than fraud committed in the names of people that are still alive.

It is therefore critical for organisations to ensure that they update their fraud prevention processes to keep up-to-date with the new techniques being employed by fraudsters. For instance, making sure there are processes in place to identify if any activity is being made by customers that are deceased.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Wilmington Millennium .