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Incident 1008: AI-Generated Voice Purporting to Be Daughter Allegedly Used to Coerce $2,000 from Colorado Mother

Description: In February 2025, a Colorado woman was scammed by a voice-cloning fraud in which criminals used what sounded like her daughter’s voice to stage a fake kidnapping. Under duress and believing her daughter was in danger, she wired $2,000 to Mexico. The scammers exploited generative AI to simulate the daughter’s voice and manipulated the victim psychologically. Law enforcement could not trace the perpetrators or recover the funds.
Editor Notes: Incident date note: Reporting states that the scam occurred on "a Monday evening in February [2025]"; the incident date of 02/10/2025 is a placeholder until the more precise date might be ascertained.

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Alleged: Unknown voice cloning technology developer developed an AI system deployed by scammers , Fraudsters , Unknown scammers operating in Mexico and Unknown scammers impersonating daughter of Linda Roan, which harmed Linda Roan , Daughter of Linda Roan and General public.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown voice cloning technology , Western Union and MoneyGram

Incident Stats

Incident ID
1008
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-02-10
Editors

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident OccurrenceThe Panicked Voice on the Phone Sounded Like Her Daughter. It Wasn’t.
The Panicked Voice on the Phone Sounded Like Her Daughter. It Wasn’t.

The Panicked Voice on the Phone Sounded Like Her Daughter. It Wasn’t.

wsj.com

The Panicked Voice on the Phone Sounded Like Her Daughter. It Wasn’t.
wsj.com · 2025

Linda Roan was making herself a bowl of soup on a Monday evening in February when her cellphone rang. The call was from a local number, so she answered. 

"Mom, I'm OK, but something awful has happened," a young woman sobbed. "I need your he…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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