AI Voice Scam Targets Westchester Parents with Fake Kidnapping Ransom Calls
January 8, 2025
Scammers used AI voice synthesis to mimic children’s voices in fake kidnapping calls, demanding ransom payments from parents in the Peekskill School District of Westchester, New York. The synthetic voices were reportedly generated from social media voice samples
- Alleged deployer
- unknown-scammers
- Alleged developer
- unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- westchester-new-york-families, peekskill-school-district-families
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/891
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.