This simple sentence should alert you: you will avoid being scammed by telephone.
The imagination of telephone scammers definitely has no limits… If you regularly receive unsolicited calls, you have surely noticed to what extent these criminals are quite stubborn by nature, and are not afraid. Over time, you may also have learned to spot a scam, whether by the number’s area code or your phone’s “Suspected Spam” alert. Unfortunately, a new scam may well challenge all your reflexes.
This saw the light of day across the Atlantic and the least we can say is that it is quite formidable. In general, phone scams are designed to either collect personal information that could be used to impersonate a victim and trick them into paying money. But this time, that’s not the case. The scam in question relies in part on artificial intelligence (AI) technology to imitate your own voice!
The call is made using a fake voice, which seems very real even though it is not. When you pick up, your fake interlocutor will then ask you “can you hear me / can you hear me?”. These are the 4 words that should ring a bell. By automatism, any person would tend to answer “yes, I hear you”except that this is when the trap closes… Your response is recorded, and automatically, the scammer can use it to authorize payments, register for services or confirm their identity from organizations for example. To do this, all you have to do is start recording your voice.
“This phone scam is particularly scary [parce qu’]it simply relies on the human behavior of answering a quick question.”underlines Matthew Shirley, director of cybersecurity operations at the American company Fortalice. Furthermore, the technologies used today by scammers, particularly AI chatbots as they are called, are very advanced. They are “capable of successfully impersonating a human in many cases, and may be indistinguishable from a human in situations such as a phone call”, explains another expert, Adam Gordon, instructor at ITProTV.
Criminals go even further to make their victims believe that a real person is on the other end of the line. In addition to the phrase “can you hear me?”, we can also hear “Sorry, I’m having problems with my headset”, reinforcing the impression that the call is authentic. For scammers, the combination is perfect: “Robocalls are incredibly cheap, it only takes a few dollars to send millions of calls,” comments the specialist. If you fear being scammed, avoid answering calls from unknown numbers as much as possible or hang up immediately when you hear these famous phrases.