Scammers in central Florida used artificial intelligence to copy the voice of a captain in the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office and left a voicemail in his name, Sheriff Chris Blackmon said on Monday.
The message identified the caller as “Captain Steve Moser” and asked the listener to contact the sheriff’s office, according to News 6, the Orlando station WKMG, whose investigative reporter Pavlina Osta reported the story. Capt. Moser is real. His photo is on the agency’s website, and the scammers used that too.
“They cloned his voice and was using Steve’s picture as well to say it was him making the phone call, and it was not,” Mr. Blackmon told News 6.
The voicemail itself didn’t ask for money. The calls it fits with usually do. Mr. Blackmon said calls claiming that people had missed jury duty or had a warrant out for their arrest were becoming more common, and the office has posted a warning on social media. The callers demand payment to head off an arrest or other legal trouble, sometimes in cryptocurrency, Fox 35 Orlando reported.
The sheriff’s office estimates about 40 cases since January in which scammers posed as law enforcement officers. That count covers all such impersonations. It is not a tally of confirmed AI voice clones, and it was not clear how many of the 40 involved one.
404 Media, which wrote about the case, described Mr. Moser as the county’s sheriff. News 6 and Fox 35 both identify him as a captain, and Mr. Blackmon holds the sheriff’s post. The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.
Impersonating a police officer is a third-degree felony in Florida.
Copying a voice takes little. Perry Carpenter, a cybersecurity expert, showed News 6 how a convincing clone could be built from audio lifted from videos posted online. “Any person with a little bit of curiosity can clone a voice with a good 20 seconds of audio,” he said. “Some of the systems that are out there can do it in under five seconds of audio.”
Similar jury duty and arrest warrant schemes were reported in Georgia and Pennsylvania in the past week, according to 404 Media. Those reports didn’t mention AI voice cloning, but said the callers sometimes sounded like local officers.
Fraud using cloned voices has been around for years, much of it aimed at older people, families and businesses, often with commercially available tools. Impersonating executives to get employees to move money is a common version. In February, scammers used AI to clone the voice of a managing partner at a law firm, and a private bank ended up transferring $108 million, 404 Media reported.
Mr. Blackmon’s advice was plain. His office will never call to demand money to clear a warrant or a missed jury summons. Anyone who gets such a call should hang up and dial the agency directly, using a number from its official website rather than one supplied by the caller, a voicemail or a text.