Purportedly AI-Cloned Voice Allegedly Used to Defraud Play School Owner of ₹97,500 (~$1.080 USD) in Indore, India

January 6, 2026

A play school owner in Indore, India was allegedly defrauded of approximately $1,080 USD after a fraudster impersonated the victim's cousin (an Uttar Pradesh police employee), using AI-based voice cloning. The scammer claimed a friend required urgent cardiac surgery and convinced the victim to transfer funds via QR codes. Unfortunately, the funds were not credited.

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GOVERN 1.7 — similarity 0.582, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 3.2 — similarity 0.582, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 2.2 — similarity 0.582, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown-scammers-in-india, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer: unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties: smita-sinha-(pseudonym), small-private-school-owners-in-indore-india, epistemic-integrity, general-public-of-madhya-pradesh

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1339

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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