Beware of voice cloning and 'Deepfake' scams: Bengaluru Police Commissioner

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: Sharing a new 'Cyber tip' on Thursday, the City Police Commissioner alerted the citizens regarding an advanced form of fraud which uses the Artificial Intelligence AI-based voice cloning system.

"This is a very unique and tricky form of scamming gullible people. In this scam, fraudsters using different techniques, obtain the voice samples of their victims and use a mimicked version of the voice to call the victim's family or relatives to request for financial help," Bengaluru Commissioner B Dayananda said.

During the pandemic, the fraudsters were following a modus operandi where they would copy the profile pictures from Facebook accounts of people and would clone the entire account along with the user's details.

They would further text the friends of the user and ask for financial help citing an emergency. Shockingly, a few ministers and police officials also fell into the trap and lost money.

Now the voice-cloning scam is also carried out on the same line. The top cop said that the fraudsters put a voice message or recorded call to the victim's relative requesting him to transfer some money citing an emergency reason.

However the fraudsters will provide a different UPI link or bank account to get the funds transferred into.

"The AI generated voice would be so realistic that even the friends or a relative cannot tell the difference and would think that the phone call is real. Several people in the rural areas have already fallen into this scam by transferring the requested fund to the UPI or bank accounts. Most of these scams were found to be operating from North states," the Police Commissioner said.

"Fortunately, no such case has been reported in Bengaluru so far," he said adding that "It is better to be on alert."

Similarly the top cop also alerted the people about deepfake methods to morph videos and photos of the victims and blackmail them for money.

He further advised the people to verify the caller's number before receiving the call and not to accept unknown or suspicious calls.