Otherwise you will fall for this.
If you do fall for it, I won’t remind you that I already told you about this kind of shit now being possible years ago.
Why do these scammers target seniors? Because almost all seniors ar dumb and dense? No. Because they have money. It’s often the generation with the most money. (I saw some work about this by a Dutch university about five or six years ago.) Because they have children, friends and grandchildren.
You also need to keep in mind that systems like Alexa as well as the various video doorbells keep your recordings. So there is staff that has access to them. There’ve been news items in relation to that as well. But as you can see in the video below, that “courier” was caught thanks to the video doorbell.
There are pluses and minuses to everything. Most people still think as if we write with feathers and fountain pens and send paper letters. The obligatory paranoia that should come with using the digital realm – including the IoT – is very hard to adopt, for everyone. We distrust people, not things.
I had a bunch of voice-cloned calls too, intended just to mess with me. The first ones that I recall took place in 2018 and I am aware of the voices of four different people having been cloned in connection with me. Just to mess with me. One of those voices was that of someone who had just passed away; she also popped up on Telegram. That call was so weird – not because of the voice – that I called the department that this woman claimed to be calling from, twice, and twice the call was cut off after someone answered.
(So I now sometimes triple-check certain things.)
As my Dutch WhatsApp calls were being recorded by a third party for a while – I couldn’t make any calls without okaying the recording first; this happened two or three times – and one of my old friends suddenly sounding utterly terrified of me when I called her again, I am pretty sure that she was voice-clone-called by fake me. Just to mess with me. Earlier this year, I received a text message from her that could not possibly have come from her, for several reasons. Could I be wrong about all of that? Sure I could.
While I was typing the above, Google insisted – which it often does and which I always ignore and which sometimes is the result of me having accidentally touched the damn icon in the browser bar – on wanting to record my voice, then played a voice – I didn’t have my headphones on so I couldn’t tell if it was my voice – and a timer went off after a minute.
