Reported Use of AI Voice and Identity Manipulation in the Ongoing 'Phantom Hacker' Fraud Scheme
October 20, 2023
Reports allege that updated variants of the long-running "Phantom Hacker" scam use purported AI tools to enhance impersonation, including voice cloning, spoofed caller ID, and realistic digital artifacts. Fraudsters reportedly pose as tech support, bank staff, and government officials in a three-phase scheme that pressures mostly older adults to transfer funds to accounts controlled by scammers.
- Alleged deployer
- unknown-scammers, phantom-hacker
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers, various-generative-ai-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- general-public, elderly-individuals, epistemic-integrity
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1280
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.