Purported AI-Generated Voice Reportedly Impersonated Washington Man's Daughter in $13,000 Extortion Scam

March 23, 2026

Mark A. Young from Washington state reportedly transferred $13,000 to scammers who manipulated an AI-generated voice, imitating his daughter. The fraudsters claimed she had been kidnapped following a staged car crash story. Over approximately 30 hours, the caller guided him to banks and money-transfer locations, asking for another $17,000. Only when a Pullman bank manager and police confirmed Young's daughter was safe, did he stop the transfer of funds.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 3.2 — similarity 0.486, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 6.2 — similarity 0.483, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.482, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown-scammers
Alleged developer: deepfake-technology-developers, synthetic-audio-generation-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties: mark-a.-young, general-public, daughter-of-mark-a.-young

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1482

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.

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