BBB: How to avoid deepfake voicemails
Published 3:39 pm Tuesday, March 25, 2025
- Waylon Cunningham
Spotting a scam isn’t as easy as it used to be. Scammers can easily make messages which appear to come from anywhere, like your boss’s email account or a close family member.
AI technology has erased the telltale signs of scam messages, making fraudulent emails and texts nearly indistinguishable from legitimate ones. Now, scammers are using AI to mimic the voice of someone you know and create a phone call or voicemail recording. This “voice cloning” technology has recently advanced, and anyone with the right software can clone a voice from a very small audio sample.
How the scam works
You receive a voicemail from someone you trust — a boss, a family member — urgently requesting money for an emergency or a rush payment. The voice is familiar, the details convincing, so you comply. Hours later, you realize the truth: the call was fake, and the money is gone.
“AI has made it harder than ever to trust what we read, see and hear,” said Mechele Agbayani Mills, President and CEO of BBB Central East Texas. “A familiar voice on the other end of the line doesn’t always mean it’s real — verifying before acting is now more important than ever.”
BBB provides the following tips on how to avoid AI cloning scams:
Resist the urge to act immediately. No matter how convincing a phone call or voicemail may sound, hang up or close the message if something doesn’t feel right. Call the person who claimed to have called you directly with the phone number you have saved for them. Don’t call back the number provided by the caller or caller ID. Ask questions that would be hard for an impostor to answer correctly.
Don’t send money. If the caller urgently asks you to send money via a digital wallet payment app or a gift card, that may be a red flag for a scam. If you wire money to someone and later realize it’s a fraud, the police must be alerted.
Secure your accounts. Whether at work or home, set up multifactor authentication for email logins and other changes in email settings. At work, verify changes in information about customers, employees, or vendors.
Train your team. Create a secure culture at your office by training employees in internet security. Make it a policy to confirm all change and payment requests before transferring. Don’t rely on email or voicemail.
If you’ve been the victim of a scam, please report it at BBB.org/ScamTracker. Your report can help expose scammers’ tactics and prevent others from having a similar experience.