AI Voice Scam Targets Westchester Parents with Fake Kidnapping Ransom Calls

January 8, 2025

Scammers employed AI voice synthesis to imitate children's voices in a hoax kidnapping scenario, demanding ransom payments from parents within the Peekskill School District of Westchester County, New York. The synthetic voices were said to be derived from social media voice samples.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.568, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.567, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 2.2 — similarity 0.561, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

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

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