HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Two Members of Highline Public Schools Community in King County, Washington Reportedly Targeted in Deepfake Kidnapping Scam

September 25, 2024

Two members of the Highline Public Schools community in Burien, a town in King County, Washington, were reportedly targeted in a deepfake kidnapping scam. Scammers used AI-generated voice cloning technology to convincingly mimic the voices of their family members. The scammers used the altered voices to falsely claim they had been kidnapped and demanding a ransom be paid.
Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
highline-public-schools, families-of-highline-public-schools

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/947

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.