Terrifying new AI scam used teen girl’s REAL voice to call her mother and demand $1million

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.

A terrified phone call from your screaming child and a faceless kidnapper demanding $1 million for their safe return.

When Arizona mom Jennifer DeStefano received such a request this week from her 15-year-old daughter Brie, she panicked, froze and began to think about how much she could afford to save her daughter’s life .

Only Brie wasn’t gagged or on his way to Mexico, as the voice had said.

She was safe on a ski trip, completely unaware of the terror her mother had to endure.

Such is the terrifying reality of the latest danger posed by increasingly menacing AI technology that now takes just three seconds of a sample to clone a person’s voice and weaponize it against their nearest and dearest.

“In the background she says, ‘Help me, Mom. Please help me. Help me,’ and roars.” DeStefano said the call was “exactly” as her daughter Brie would scream and cry

DeStefano’s daughter has no public social media accounts, but her voice can be heard in a handful of interviews for school and sports, her mother says.

She recently received a call from an unknown number while her daughter was skiing.

“I pick up the phone and I hear my daughter’s voice, and it says, ‘Mom!’ and she sobs.

“I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, “Mom, I messed up,” and she’s sobbing and crying,” she recalled at the local Scottsdale station WKYT.

Then she heard a man tell Brie to “put her head down” and “lie down.”

Brie was safe on a ski trip, completely unaware of the terror her mother had endured

“This guy comes on the phone and he says, ‘Listen. I’ve got your daughter. This is how it’s going to happen.

“You call the police, you call someone, I’m going to pop her so full of drugs. I’m going to have my way and I’m going to drop her off in Mexico.”

“And at that point I just started shaking.

“In the background she says, ‘Help me, Mom. Please help me. Help me,’ and roars.”

At first he demanded $1 million. When she said she didn’t have the money, he lowered the demand to $50,000.

At the time of the call, DeStefano was surrounded by other mothers at her other daughter’s dance practice.

They called 911 while she was still on the phone with the scammer and also called her husband, who verified that Brie was safe.

Instead of transferring the money, the scammer demanded to meet DeStefano in person.

Now she warns other parents about the dangers of rapidly developing technology.

It was all her voice. It was her bow. It was the way she would have cried.

“I never doubted for a second that it was her. That’s the crazy thing that really hit me to the core.’

“My biggest fear is that this will be used to physically lure and kidnap others, as they had demanded of me.

“If this happened to you, or someone you know, report it! The only way to stop this is to raise public awareness!

“Also have a family emergency word or question that only you know so you can validate you’re not being scammed with AI!” she said on Facebook.

Fears of the rapid development of AI technology, including ChatGPT, are growing