Clive Kabatznik is an investor from Florida who a few days ago carried out a great scam with very advanced technology. It all started when he called his Bank of America representative to ask to make a large money transfer.
Shortly after, the employee of that bank received another call from someone saying that he was Kabatznik. and even with the same voice, and that he asked that the transfer of which they had spoken before be sent to another destination.
It later emerged that a computer program had generated his voice to impersonate the investor. Specifically, it had been used a technology to generate deepfakes voice. And this is not an isolated case, according to experts.
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How the fraud was detected
In this case, They managed to detect that it was a fraud. From the banker’s description, it seemed that the scammer was trying to convince her to transfer the money to a new destination, but the voice was repetitive, even continuing to speak when she did and using confusing phrases.
The Bank did not want to speak to the media but it was the investor victim of the scam who has recounted what happened, according to what Bank of America staff told him. Kabatznik has explained that, after receiving two other similar calls in a row, the banker informed the Bank of America security team.
Then they even stopped responding to their calls and emails (also those from the real investor). Kabatznik ended up going to the bank’s offices in person 10 days later to understand what was happening and why no one was responding to him.
How can these attacks be prepared?
According to The New York Times, Pindrop is a company that monitors audio traffic for various large banks in the United States and has seen that this year voice fraud attempts have become more sophisticated. They talk about the fact that it is still a very new problem and that for this reason there is not a good count of how many of these scams occur.
Cyber scammers have several tools at their disposal to pull off scams of this caliber. In clandestine markets or on the dark web you can buy people’s data such as bank accounts and personal information.
If we are talking about people with a lot of money (for example, large investors or managers) it may be that they have participated in public meetings or that They have a video on their social networks where they simply speak. Criminals can search for interventions from them online to find out what their voice is like and collect those audio samples.
For example, in the case of the protagonist of this story, there is content on the Internet where he appears and from there his voice can be extracted: videos of him speaking at a conference or participating in a fundraiser.
A new but growing phenomenon
According to Pindrop, which has reviewed the recordings of more than 5 billion calls received at the call centers of the financial companies it serves, there are a huge number of calls coming from scammers (usually between 1,000 and 10,000 year).
What changes now is that while the fake voices created by computer programs only accounted for a few of these calls, the company has seen a lot of momentum this year. It is very common for someone to call saying that their credit card has been rejected to get them to give them money by other means or their own card information.
Although for now, for the most part, you are voice scams are usually rudimentary because they display a very robotic voice, According to information from the aforementioned company, deepfakes are going to improve their techniques and make this process much more realistic in order to achieve the goal of stealing money.
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Image | Photo by Soundtrap on Unsplash