Have you ever received an email from someone claiming to be a long-lost relative who left you stranded on vacation without your wallet or passport and demanded $1,000 to get home? But honestly, even the wisest among us can fall for such things. And AI is making it even harder to tell when someone is trying to take us for a ride: the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is now warning us about a new scam game where scammers actually call unsuspecting victims, pretend to be their own family members, and use AI tools to make it more convincing The report cautions about the following.

Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Rina Khan (via Bloomberg) said at a recent event that as AI tools develop, "we need to be early vigilant."

Khan was talking about scammers getting snippets of people's voices from social media and training AI to mimic them. They use AI-powered text-to-speech software to feed them lines and make them sound like the target's distressed relatives. This is basically the same technique that pranksters on 4chan have used to create AI-generated voice clips of celebrities saying all sorts of awful things. The scam usually involves the relative demanding money to go home or claiming they are in jail and need bail money.

Khan is concerned that further development of voice imitation technology will lead to a surge in fraud and other harmful practices, affecting civil rights, fair competition, consumer protection, and equal opportunity.

According to the FTC, in 2022 alone, there were 5,100 reported cases of telephone fraud, resulting in approximately $11 million in losses. However, this is a small fraction of the whopping $8.8 billion lost by fraud overall, a 30% increase from the previous year. The scammers are really on a roll.

Bloomberg notes that the U.S. has laws against imposter scams, and they are already in place for situations like this. But even so, the scammers are still going strong, and the tools they use for such scams are easy to obtain and fairly simple to operate. Thankfully, reporting scams and trying to recover stolen funds has become somewhat easier, but it can still be a bit of a nightmare.

In a joint statement with the DOJ on AI in April, Kahn wrote: "The FTC vigorously enforces the law to combat unfair or deceptive practices and unfair methods of competition.