A mother from Arizona almost fell for a kidnapping hoax after the culprits used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to clone her daughter’s voice.
According to People magazine, Jennifer DeStefano shared that her daughter, Briana, was on a ski vacation with her friends when the mother received a phone call from an anonymous number, where she heard her daughter crying and pleading for help.
“I heard my daughter’s voice crying and sobbing, saying, ‘Mom.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, what happened?’ She’s like, ‘Mom, these bad men have me. Help me, help me.’ “
A man then talked to her and demanded that she pay $1 million to free her daughter.
“This man gets on the phone and he’s like, ‘Listen here. I’ve got your daughter. This is how it’s going to go down. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m going to pop her so full of drugs. I’m going to have my way with her and I’m going to drop her off in Mexico,'” she said. “And at that moment, I just started shaking. In the background, she’s going, ‘Help me, Mom. Please help me. Help me,’ and bawling.”
DeStefano, who was at a dance studio when she received the call, negotiated with the man to take the ransom down to $500,000, while her acquaintance contacted the police and her husband contacted Briana, who revealed that she was safe and in her room.
“She was upstairs in her room. Then I get angry, obviously, with these guys. This is not something you play around with.”
DeStefano shared that she was truly shocked how similar her daughter’s voice sounded to the voice she had heard on the phone, which had been cloned by AI.
“It was completely her voice. It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried. I never doubted for one second it was her. That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core.”
Briana also revealed how terrifying this situation could have gotten, had her mother not confirmed her whereabouts:
“I started to wonder, like, if these people were asking to track my mom and pick her up, they could have obviously been putting some information together to try and track me or some of my siblings to actually make this a reality. So it definitely scared me.”
