Effectively combating voice fraud requires a combination of education, caution, business practices, technology and government regulation.
It’s hard to believe that deepfakes have been with us long enough that we don’t even blink at the sound of a new case of identity manipulation. But it hasn’t been quite that long for us to forget.
In 2018, a deepfake showing Barack Obama saying words he never uttered set the internet ablaze and prompted concern among U.S. lawmakers. They warned of a future where AI could disrupt elections or spread misinformation.
In 2019, a famous manipulated video of Nancy Pelosi spread like wildfire across social media. The video was subtly altered to make her speech seem slurred and her movements sluggish, implying her incapacity or intoxication during an official speech.
In 2020, deepfake videos were used to heighten political tension between China and India.
And I won’t even get into the hundreds — if not thousands — of celebrity videos that have circulated the internet in the last few years, from Taylor Swift’s pornography scandal, to Mark Zuckerberg’s sinister speech about Facebook’s power.
Yet despite these concerns, there’s a more subtle and potentially more deceptive threat looming: voice fraud. Which — at the risk of sounding like a doomer — could very well prove to be the nail that sealed the coffin.The invisible problem
Unlike high-definition video, the typical transmission quality of audio, especially in phone calls, is markedly low.
By now, we are desensitized to low fidelity audio — from poor signal, to background static, to distortions — which makes it incredibly difficult to distinguish a real anomaly.
The inherent imperfections in audio offer a veil of anonymity to voice manipulations. A slightly robotic tone or a static-laden voice message can easily be dismissed as a technical glitch rather than an attempt at fraud.
