A California senior citizen was swindled out of $25,000 by scammers using an AI voice mimicking his son to make him believe his loved one was involved in a “horrible accident” and needed money to be bailed out of jail.
The man, identified only as Anthony, said he received a call from who he believed to be his son, saying he had struck a pregnant woman while driving, and she was “rushed to the ICU,” according to ABC 7.
“It was his voice. It was absolutely his voice,” he told the outlet. “There was no doubt about it.”
Anthony said that after a short conversation, the scammer — using his son’s AI-generated voice — hung up, but he received a second phone call minutes later from a man claiming to be his son’s lawyer, Michael Roberts.
“He said, ‘You need to get $9,200 as fast as you can if you want your son out of jail. Otherwise, he’s in for 45 days,’” Anthony recounted.
Suspicious about the lawyer’s call, Anthony said he tried calling his son to verify that he needed the bail money, but his call was sent to voicemail.
The worried father then went to his bank and told the teller he needed a large sum of money for solar panel installation — so as not to raise any unwanted questions about the situation.
After returning home, Anthony had his daughter call the lawyer again, who told them an Uber would be by shortly to pick up the bail money.
Surveillance cameras outside his home show his daughter verifying the Uber license plate number and handing the money to the driver.
However, the scammers weren’t finished.
Moments after the driver left, Anthony received another phone call, this time from a man named Mark Cohen, who identified himself as another lawyer on his son’s case and told him the pregnant woman had died and his son’s bail had been raised.
“The bail has been raised. Mark Cohen says another $15,800 to $25,000,” Anthony recounted.
Fearing his son desperately needs the money to be bailed out of jail, the concerned father returns to the bank and repeats the entire process.
After pulling out more money from the bank and handing the second payment to another Uber driver, the calls stopped, and Anthony was left wondering if his son had been released from jail.
As they waited, he said his daughter began researching the number and what was said to him online, where she made a disheartening discovery.
“‘Dad, I hope I’m wrong. I think you’ve just been scammed out of $25,000,’” he recalled his daughter telling him.
Anthony said he was so worried about the fate of his son that it “never even crossed” his mind until after the fact that he was being swindled out of a large chunk of his savings.
“I never had a chance to do a second call unless I were to say to them, ‘Hold it. I’m stopping this whole thing for a minute. I want to talk to my son. I don’t care if he’s in jail or where he is, I want to talk to my son.’ You don’t think that way. You don’t,” he said.
The senior shared that the whole situation moved so “fast” that he didn’t have time to question if he was being conned.
“I look like a fool. I feel like a fool, but I don’t care,” Anthony said, explaining that he shared his story to help others become aware of this issue.
Los Angeles Police Department detective Chelsea Saeger told ABC 7 that scammers have become “more clever and sophisticated” over recent years.
“They are using social media and technology to craft these very believable and convincing stories, and people really do believe they’re talking to a grandchild or a government official,” Saeger said.
While phone scams are not new, technological advances — specifically in artificial intelligence and number blockers — have opened a new playing field for fraudsters who pray on unsuspecting victims to steal their hard-earned money.
“They call, and when you answer, and it’s a scammer, there’s silence,” Saeger explained.
“They want you to say ‘hello’ or ‘is anybody there?’ All they need is three seconds of your voice to input it into AI and to clone it.”
The detective also said scammers will go through “video posts” on social media as a way for them to capture voices and clone them to use to defraud others.
Saeger told the outlet that the department was investigating what had happened to Anthony and looking into the drivers who had picked up the money.
However, she revealed that Uber or Lyft drivers are usually uninvolved in the con and are just hired to complete the task — completely unaware that they are even part of the scam.
Saeger said never to send money to someone you don’t know.
If they claim to be a government agency or financial institution, those places will never call and ask you to send money immediately.
She also shared that scammers may ask their “victims to deposit money into crypto ATMs or transfer money into crypto accounts,” which is a massive red flag.
