Don’t fall for AI scams cloning cops’ voices, police warn

AI is giving scammers a more convincing way to impersonate police, reports show.

Just last week, the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) warned of an email scam using AI to convincingly clone the voice of Police Chief Mike Brown.

A citizen tipped off cops after receiving a suspicious email that included a video showing the police chief claiming that they "owed the federal government nearly $100,000."

To dupe their targets, the scammers cut together real footage from one of Brown's prior TV interviews with AI-generated audio that SLCPD said "is clear and closely impersonates the voice of Chief Brown, which could lead community members to believe the message was legitimate."

The FBI has warned for years of scammers attempting extortion by impersonating cops or government officials. But as AI voice-cloning technology has advanced, these scams could become much harder to detect, to the point where even the most forward-thinking companies like OpenAI have been hesitant to release the latest tech due to obvious concerns about potential abuse.

SLCPD noted that there were clues in the email impersonating their police chief that a tech-savvy citizen could have picked up on. A more careful listen reveals "the message had unnatural speech patterns, odd emphasis on certain words, and an inconsistent tone," as well as "detectable acoustic edits from one sentence to the next." And perhaps most glaringly, the scam email came from "a Google account and had the Salt Lake City Police Department’s name in it followed by a numeric number," instead of from the police department's official email domain of "slc.gov."

SLCPD isn't the only police department dealing with AI cop impersonators. Tulsa had a similar problem this summer when scammers started calling residents using a convincing fake voice designed to sound like Tulsa police officer Eric Spradlin, Public Radio Tulsa reported. A software developer who received the call, Myles David, said he understood the AI risks today but that even he was "caught off guard" and had to call police to verify the call wasn't real.