AI can replicate voices in high-tech phone call scams, FTC warns

The FTC is sounding the alarm on artificial intelligence being used to simulate someone’s voice in imposter scams, which was the most commonly reported fraud in 2022. NBC News’ Emilie Ikeda spoke to one father who got a call that sounded like his daughter and said she was being held hostage…

The action follows a similar order in July that prevented phone companies from fielding calls from several companies alleged to be responsible for a glut of offers for car warranties.

The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that it had blocked all U.S. phone companies from taking calls from a tiny communications company accused of sending robocalls that push fraudulent student loan relief services.

Tens of millions of such calls, which often claim to come from a generic “student loan center,” went out to U.S. phones in recent months, said Alex Quilici, the CEO of the anti-robocall company YouMail, which helped the FCC with its investigation. The calls usually referred to the White House student loan forgiveness program and falsely claimed that people in the U.S. with student loans needed to either tell the caller their personal information or pay a fee to receive up to $10,000 in student debt relief.

“Today we’re cutting these scammers off so they can’t use efforts to provide student loan debt relief as cover for fraud,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in an emailed statement.

The FCC’s action to block student loan robocalls follows a similar order in July that prevented phone companies from fielding calls from several companies alleged to be responsible for a glut of offers for car warranties. The calls became so common that they inspired their own internet meme…

A New Jersey-based company that sold septic tank cleaning products was ordered to dissolve and pay $1.66 million in fines after the government sued its owners for making millions of illegal robocalls.

Environment Safety International (ESI), addressed to Fairview in Bergen County, made more than 45 million illegal robocalls over a 15-month period between January 2018 and March 2019, the Federal Trade Commission claims. The agency says more than two-thirds of those telemarketing calls were made to numbers listed on the FTC’s National Do-Not-Call Registry.

Brothers Joseph and Sean Carney, who co-own and operate ESI, worked alongside their younger brother, Raymond Carney, to conduct their alleged telemarketing scheme dating back more than a decade. In the lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice, Raymond Carney allegedly formed Carbro in 2009 with the purpose of contacting potential customers to sell ESI’s cleaning products — ESI was their only client, the complaint says…

“No point of making a robocall if no one’s there when you press 1.”

Robocalls may have met their match in the pandemic.

The number of scam calls to phone lines in the United States dropped by half at the start of the pandemic, as lockdowns closed the call centers necessary to robocall enterprises and reduced the number of phone lines with a person on the other end.

Robocalls, auto-dialed calls that usually come with a recorded message that attempt to cheat victims, started coming back after the initial decline. Then Covid-19 walloped India and calls fell almost 20 percent from March to May, as the disease surged and prompted states and cities to institute a new wave of lockdowns.

Alex Quilici, CEO of the voicemail provider and scam-blocking app YouMail, said the lockdowns have had the side effect of preventing people who work at call centers from going in to those call centers.

“They couldn’t leave their homes, so they couldn’t do the scams,” Quilici said. “No point of making a robocall if no one’s there when you press 1.”

India, along with Pakistan and the Dominican Republic, are among the main origin points for illegal robocalls involving Social Security, debt collection and bogus utilities, said Josh Bercu, vice president of policy and advocacy at USTelecom, the association that organizes the industry’s robocall tracing efforts. “Those types of pure fraud almost always are coming from overseas,” Bercu said.

Scam calls peaked in October 2019, when an estimated 5.7 billion scam calls reached consumers, according to data from YouMail. Quilici said that while a series of enforcement actions from the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice brought the total down some in late 2019 and early 2020, they absolutely bottomed out in April and May 2020, falling by nearly half.

“The weeks that India and Pakistan shut down, we saw robocalls fall off a cliff,” Quilici said of the 2020 shutdowns.

The number of calls have crawled back up since then, reaching a pandemic-era high of 4.9 million calls in the U.S. in March before falling again. But the types of scams have evolved as well. In May, YouMail warned that Americans were getting up to 150 million calls a month from scammers pretending to be from Amazon.

Marriott filed a lawsuit against 10 unknown robocall operators in May, claiming they made more than a half-million calls to residents in Virginia from October 2020 to March. In the filing, Marriott alleged the scammers tried to swindle people with bogus complementary stays at Marriott hotels, leading to what the company called an “exponential increase” in complaints from customers….

With more people using their smartphones to make payments and many banks and utilities verifying users’ accounts through text messages, the fraud floodgates have opened.

It took just a momentary lapse in judgment for Alyssa Beckwith to fall for the scam.

The text message she received looked legitimate — even expected. After some of her personal information had already been stolen a few years ago, she signed up for text alerts from her bank, Wells Fargo, to confirm each time she made a new purchase. And that step to protect herself, ironically, is what made her such an easy target.

So when a scammer texted Beckwith in April, telling her that her Wells Fargo card had been charged with a $240 withdrawal and to “Contact Us if Suspicious,” she didn’t think twice and called. A robotic voice welcomed her to Wells Fargo and asked her to verify herself, so she entered in her credit card number, Social Security number and birthday.

“This information is valid. Thank you,” the voice said, and hung up. Only then did she realize her mistake.

“I was like, wait a minute,” Beckwith said in a phone interview. “I’m surprised it didn’t connect me with somebody to talk to. Usually that’s what happens. That’s when I thought, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, I think this is a scam.'”

In the space of a few minutes, Beckwith became the latest victim of “smishing,” or SMS phishing, in which a scammer sends a text message to trick a person into turning over some sensitive personal information, which can be used for all sorts of fraud, like siphoning money from their bank account or opening up credit cards in their name.

Unwanted texts have existed for practically as long as the text message itself. But with more people using their smartphones to make payments and as many sites for banks and utilities verify users’ accounts through text messages, the fraud floodgates have opened.

The numbers are staggering. The Federal Trade Commission got 334,833 complaints about scam texts last year, more than double the year before. People around the world were exposed to about 125 percent more smishing attempts every three months, a new study from the cybersecurity company Lookout found. 

Jacinta Tobin, a vice president at Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company that specializes in threats to mobile phones, said scammers and criminal hackers noticed that more marketers and businesses interact with people through text messages and simply followed that trend.

“Before, text was a very clean, relatively speaking, peer-to-peer channel. You don’t communicate with strangers via text. It’s just friends,” Tobin said in a phone interview. “But now texting has opened as a more general communication channel for business, like transaction confirmations, fraud alerts.” 

Scam and phishing messages sent via text are particularly tenacious because there’s little ability to block them. Good email providers now block most junk and phishing emails, making email spam a shadow of the problem it once was. While unwanted phone calls are annoying, you can at least look at the caller’s number and decide to not to take a call.

But though smartphones are nearly ubiquitous — 97 percent of Americans own one — there’s very little people can do to stop unwanted texts. Apple and Google, the respective manufacturers of the iOS and Android smartphone operating systems, advise users to block unwanted numbers, but it’s so easy for scammers to pretend to send messages from different numbers that such strategies are effectively meaningless. Apple at least allows users to filter all messages from people who aren’t already in their contacts, but that doesn’t flag which texts are likely to be scams, and it puts them in the same folder as authentic messages from unsaved numbers.

Data breaches of users’ personal information — including their phone numbers — are a frequent occurrence, and hackers regularly trade people’s data with eager scammers. It’s so common that in April, after researchers realized that hackers were able to pull more than half a billion Facebook users’ names and phone numbers from the site, Facebook accidentally sent a Dutch reporter an internal memo that “we expect more scraping incidents and think it’s important to both frame this as a broad industry issue and normalize the fact that this activity happens regularly.”

There’s also little indication that authorities are doing much about it or have advice for the public. Once Beckwith realized she’d fallen for a scam, she contacted the FTC, which didn’t respond, and the Social Security Administration, which told her to monitor her credit. But that was all the help they gave, and while she hasn’t noticed anyone taking out a loan in her name, the spam texts have only gotten worse.

“I get texts about ‘your package from UPS is waiting, please click this link to confirm,'” she said. “Texts from ‘Amazon,’ I get one of those almost every day.”

While U.S. phone carriers do have some anti-spam measures in place, their process for guarding against scammers is largely opaque, and they offer little specific help to customers. Sprint and Verizon didn’t respond to requests for comment. AT&T declined to comment but pointed to the official guidance from the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, an industry trade group, which has a few recommendations for users who get spam texts, including, “If you receive texts you don’t want, respond ‘STOP.'”

July 31, 2019

Your heart races as your cellphone on the bedside table comes alive and wakes you in the middle of the night. Through blurry eyes, you see the number flash across your screen and recognize it instantly — the cancer center where your loved one is being treated. Your anxiety rises as you answer the phone.

Only it’s a fraud. A scam robocall has been able to make it appear that the number of origin is the hospital’s, and to try to use the fear and urgency of the situation to pry sensitive personal and financial information from the unwitting person who receives the call.

September 12, 2018

The phone call in early June purporting to be from Chinese authorities was, in a word, alarming. The Massachusetts woman who answered it learned she may have been the victim of identity theft.

But after almost a week of corresponding and sharing personal information over the phone in an effort to find how her identity had apparently been stolen things went very wrong very quickly…

April 3, 2018

When news broke last week of a hacking attack on Baltimore’s 911 system, Chad Howard felt a rush of nightmarish memories.

Howard, the information technology manager for Henry County, Tennessee, faced a similar intrusion in June 2016, in one of the country’s first so-called ransomware attacks on a 911 call center. The hackers shut down the center’s computerized dispatch system and demanded more than $2,000 in bitcoin to turn it back on. Refusing payment, Howard’s staff tracked emergency calls with pencil and paper for three days as the system was rebuilt…

Los Angeles police arrested a 25-year-old man in a suspected “swatting” hoax 911 call in Kansas that ended in the fatal police shooting of an unarmed man.

The LAPD took Tyler Barriss of Los Angeles into custody in that city on Friday afternoon, on a fugitive warrant stemming from the Thursday evening incident in Kansas, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said.

December 30, 2017

Los Angeles police arrested a 25-year-old man in a suspected “swatting” hoax 911 call in Kansas that ended in the fatal police shooting of an unarmed man.

The LAPD took Tyler Barriss of Los Angeles into custody in that city on Friday afternoon, on a fugitive warrant stemming from the Thursday evening incident in Kansas, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said.

April 20, 2017

We may be getting more technologically advanced every day, but we still haven’t outgrown (or outsmarted) the age-old nuisance of robocalls. In fact, robocalling is more rampant than ever — and scamming Americans out of billions.

A new study by Truecaller found that in 2016 roughly 22.1 million Americans lost a total of $9.5 billion in robocall scams — far more than in 2015 — with the average loss per person at roughly $430. In 2015, 27 million people reported scams to Truecaller, and though the number of reports was higher than in 2016, the average loss was much lower, at about $274, said Tom Hsieh, VP of growth and partnerships at Truecaller…

February 7, 2017

It’s the one thing everyone can agree on in these divisive times: We all hate robocalls. But how will the Federal Communications Commission respond to this growing problem with Ajit Pai, a Republican, as the new chairman, appointed by a president who wants to slash government regulations?

January 30, 2017

Have you gotten one of these “Can you hear me now?” phone calls.

No, “The Verizon Guy” (now the Sprint guy) is not ringing you up. It’s a robocall scammer who wants to steal your identity and money…