Incident·WS-0001·Jan 2023·disclosed Jun 13, 2023 (149 days later)·in the wild·Deepfakes & fraud
Voice-cloned daughter used in fake kidnapping call
27/100
WS-2 ModerateHarm score 30, signal score 24. Autonomy: tool (a person misused it). How the scores work.
Harm 2/5
damage actually done
Reach 1/5
who was affected
Autonomy 0/4
how much the AI did on its own
Novelty 3/5
how new the behavior was
Permanence 1/5
how hard it is to undo
An Arizona mother, Jennifer DeStefano, got a call in which a voice indistinguishable from her teenage daughter cried for help before a man demanded a ransom, first $1 million and then $50,000. Her daughter was safe; she later described the AI voice-clone scam to the US Senate. It became the emblem of a wave of 'family emergency' voice-clone scams.
Damage
No money paid; attempted $50,000 extortion; severe distress
The capability behind it
- VALL-E clones a voice from 3 seconds of audioJan 5, 2023 · Microsoft Research · reliable for a defined task: yes
Sources
US Senate testimony. Evidence confidence: medium. Month of the call is from contemporaneous press.
Factor ratings and the score are this index’s judgments by a published formula; facts, dates and figures come from the linked sources. Where a lawsuit is pending, the summary reports allegations, not findings.
