Picture the call. It’s your bank, supposedly, warning that someone is attempting a big wire transfer out of your account. To block it, the caller needs your PIN. Odd request. But the voice sounds like home: your own Yooper accent, straight from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Monday’s Journal Report, Heidi Mitchell explains why that familiarity is exactly what the scammer is counting on.
Why the accent works
AI has feasted on the speech people post on social media and elsewhere online, and it can now copy local accents with unnerving accuracy. Neil Kirk, an associate professor of psychology at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, tested 150 online participants in Scotland. They heard human and AI voices in Scottish Standard English or Dundonian Scots, a dialect spoken by about 30% of Dundee’s residents.
Most listeners took both the humans and the machines for people. “They simply didn’t expect a machine to sound like them,” Kirk says. The Dundonian fakes fooled them even more often: the more particular the accent, the more human it seemed.
Familiar voices sway money decisions, too. Na Kyong (Kimberly) Hyun, a University of Cincinnati marketing professor, studied 14 seasons of “Shark Tank.” The more an entrepreneur’s voice resembled a panelist’s, the better the odds of a deal with that panelist. Meanwhile ElevenLabs, which the Journal calls the most popular voice-generating platform, says it can clone a voice from a 10-second clip.
Question the story
If a familiar voice can’t prove who’s calling, question the story instead, says James Mullen, head of research at cybersecurity company Edgescan. Does it hang together, and does it fit what you already know? Then contact that person separately, through a phone number you already know is real.
With a bank, that means hanging up and dialing the number on your statement or card. Credentials never go to someone who called you out of the blue, however real the voice sounds. Awareness helps, too: once Kirk told participants AI can reproduce Scottish accents, they were significantly less likely to mistake synthetic voices for human.
We’d add two checks a cloned voice can’t fake on its own. Agree on a family code word in person, keep it off social media, and ask for it whenever a relative calls in a rush for money. And if an account lets your voice work as a password, don’t let it be the only lock.