Ariel Salgado / Unsplash
DEEPFAKES & SCAMS
AI Cloned Her Daughter's Voice. She Lost $15,000.
The voice was exact – that's exactly what the tool is built to do.
In July 2025, the phone rang in Dover, Florida. Sharon Brightwell heard her daughter – crying, saying she'd been in a car accident. The voice was exact. So Sharon sent $15,000 in cash to a courier. It was not her daughter. Sharon wasn't careless – the clone was exact, because that is exactly what the tool is built to do.1
$893M
stolen through AI scams in 2025, the first year the FBI tracked them. The FBI calls it an undercount.
Source · FBI Internet Crime Report, 20252
What's happening
Cloning a voice takes three seconds of audio and costs about a dollar. A scammer grabs a clip from TikTok or a voicemail, scripts an emergency, and calls someone who loves you.
Older adults are hit hardest – they lost $352 million to AI scams in 2025 alone. Steve Beauchamp, 82, watched a deepfake video of a well-known billionaire endorsing an investment; scammers drained $690,000. Fake images of real children are a different harm – see how AI puts kids at risk. This page is about scams that target adults.23
It reaches further than your bank account. In January 2024, thousands of New Hampshire voters got a robocall in a cloned voice of President Biden, telling them not to vote in the primary. The call cost about $1 and took under 20 minutes to make. Weeks later, the FCC made AI voices in robocalls illegal.45
$352M
lost by older adults to AI scams in 2025 – hit harder than any other age group.
Source · FBI, 20252
Where are the rules?
Your bank has to verify who's moving your money. The company whose tool cloned your daughter's voice has to verify nothing.
Consumer Reports tested six voice-cloning products: four asked for nothing but a checkbox. 75,000 people petitioned the regulators; the tools keep shipping. "There is no remedy," attorney Gary Schildhorn told the Senate after scammers cloned his son's voice, "and that fundamental basis is broken." The lobbyists keeping it this way cost about $226,000 a day.67
The man who commissioned the New Hampshire call drew a $6 million federal fine. He still has not paid it.5
“If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”
It's bigger than one scam
We wouldn't let a drug company skip testing and sell you the pill. We wouldn't let a carmaker skip crash tests and sell you the car. But AI tools are scamming grandparents and faking voices – with no testing standards at all. Same technology. Same missing rules.
And the biggest AI companies are in the fakes business too. OpenAI's Sora filled feeds with lifelike fake videos of real people within days of launch (October 2025). xAI's Grok made fake sexual videos of Taylor Swift without anyone asking. These companies aren't building a better chatbot – their own mission statements say the goal is AI that does everything a human can do. A company that won't check who's cloning your voice today won't check what its AI breaks tomorrow. Here's how this connects to the bigger fight.8
The rules that catch this today are the rules that keep AI accountable as it gets more powerful.
The bigger picture
Keep humans in control
What you can do
A company should have to check who's using a tool that can copy your voice – and answer when its tool is used to steal from you. We made carmakers crash-test before selling; we can require the same proof here. See the standards we're asking for.
Questions people ask
Set a family code word now – a word only your family knows. If a caller claiming to be a relative can't say it, hang up and call back on a number you already have. Real emergencies leave time to verify; pressure to skip that step is the scam's tell. For a video, check the person's official channels before acting on anything they appear to say.
A scammer copies a voice from public audio – a few seconds from social media is enough. They script a scenario built to trigger panic: an accident, an arrest, a kidnapping. Then they push you to send money fast. Caller ID can be faked too, so a familiar number proves nothing.
The tools that make cloning possible aren't required to check who uses them or get consent for a voice. When a scam lands, the victim absorbs the loss and the company faces no consequence. Congress is debating new rules. They are not law yet. But musicians organized in Tennessee and won a unanimous law requiring consent before anyone clones your voice – every state can do the same.
More resources
These are independent resources – not from us. Each one is worth your time.
FTC: Voice Cloning Scams – Government consumer guidance, including how to set a family code word.
FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center – How criminals use AI for fraud, and how to report it if it happens to you.
AARP Fraud Watch Network – Plain-language help on AI voice and video scams aimed at older adults.
Sources13 references · tap to expand
Check everything – every number on this page comes from somewhere you can read.
- 1 ↩FOX 13 Tampa Bay · Brightwell $15K voice-clone scam · July 2025
- 2 ↩FBI Internet Crime Report · $352M older adults lost to AI scams · 2025
- 3 ↩New York Times · Beauchamp $690K deepfake investment scam · August 14, 2024
- 4 ↩NBC News · NH Biden robocall; $1 cost; 20 minutes · February 2024
- 5 ↩FCC · AI robocall ban; $6M fine unpaid · February 2024
- 6 ↩Consumer Reports · 4 of 6 voice-cloning tools: no safeguards · March 10, 2025
- 7 ↩Issue One / Fortune · $226K/day AI lobbying spend · April 23, 2026
- 8 ↩AI Incident Database · Grok Imagine fake videos; no consent · August 2025
- 9 ↩Senate Aging Committee · Schildhorn testimony; no legal remedy · November 16, 2023
- 10 ↩Dario Amodei, “The Urgency of Interpretability” · Amodei: we don’t understand how our own AI works · April 24, 2025
- 11 ↩CBS News, 60 Minutes · Pichai: AI is a “black box” we don’t fully understand · April 16, 2023
- 12 ↩CNBC (Musk at SXSW) · Musk: AI more dangerous than nuclear warheads · March 13, 2018
- 13 ↩Business Insider; Future of Life Institute · Altman: AI may “lead to the end of the world” · June 2015
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