That panicked call asking for help isn't your loved one. It's an AI-generated fake trying to scam you.
Family emergency scams are terrifying and effective because they can cause panic, forcing victims to fall for scam that they normally wouldn't. Learn how to protect yourself and your family.
“Family emergency” scams are something that I post about every year because they are so dangerous, devastating both emotionally and financially, and becoming easier as generative AI technology makes impersonation easier than ever.
Understanding and knowing that these scams exist is critical in preventing their harm. If people understand that this type of scheme exists, their index of suspicion will be higher, and they will be less likely to fall for such a scheme. This is why it’s essential to discuss family emergency scams with everyone in your family, including your children, spouses, parents, grandparents, and others.
A five-minute conversation with your family can protect you from a great deal of future harm, anxiety, and stress.
What are family emergency scams?
A family emergency scam occurs when a scammer contacts a victim, pretending that someone in their family is in an emergency and needs help, typically in the form of money to resolve the situation. The emergency might be that they are arrested, stranded, in need of medical assistance, or even kidnapped.
Here’s how they generally work:
The scammer might impersonate a family member using generative AI that leverages a voice sample captured from social media or voicemail.
The scammer might impersonate an authority figure such as a police officer, a court, or a doctor.
The scammer will say:
There’s an emergency that your family member is in (needs bail, hurt, stranded, etc.)
They need money NOW from you to solve the emergency.
Although I haven’t seen any reports of video-based impersonation used in these types of scams yet, it is either happening or will be happening soon. Generative AI can create very believable videos from still images. It can also be used to create a filter of your family members’ likeness and voice for a video call.
To maximize their chances of success, scammers will attempt to create:
An extreme emotional reaction that reduces the likelihood of you stopping to think and getting help; the scammer is trying to induce panic.
A sense of urgency forces you to move quickly, so you don’t have time to think or get help.
The need for secrecy so that you can’t contact anyone to confirm the problem or get help.
Isolation. The scammers might try to isolate you so you can’t get help. This might be by keeping you on the phone so you can’t use it to call someone else. They might claim they are tracking you and force you into a car, claiming a lack of compliance will result in more harm to the loved one.
Once the scammer has convinced you that your family member is in trouble, they will provide you with instructions on how to send the money to them. This may be through a P2P payment App, through cryptocurrency, or gift cards.
A Note on Virtual Kidnapping Scams
The most terrifying version of family emergency scams is the virtual kidnapping scam, where a scammer calls and says they have your family member hostage, and you have to pay a ransom to get them back unharmed.
With generative AI and publicly accessible photos, videos, and audio of someone, it’s trivial to fake a loved one’s voice as “proof” that they are in custody. It’s trivial to fake an image or video of a loved one in a captive situation.
This proof will reasonably induce panic in a sibling, parent, grandparent, or other relative and force immediate compliance. Then the scammer isolates the victim, keeps them on the phone so the victim is under constant surveillance and can’t get help, and then gets the victim to do what the scammer wants.
Here are two articles with real-world examples of these terrifying scams that are worth reading.
Protect Yourself and Your Family
These two rules will help prevent you from becoming a victim of any attempted scam situation. Here’s a great reference from the Cybercrime Support Network: scamspotter.org.
Pause - Slow it down. Ask questions. Don’t be rushed. It’s almost certainly not a real emergency. But if it is a real emergency, there is time to slow down, get help, and verify.
Verify - Take the time to verify what you are being told. If it’s someone claiming to be an official, tell them you will call them back through their department switchboard. If it’s a family member, tell them you will call them back or call them from where they claim to be (i.e., a police station).
Specific tips to protect yourself from family emergency scams
Inform your loved ones about the existence of these scams. If a family member doesn’t know that this type of scam happens, they are much more likely to fall victim to it because they won’t be as inclined to be skeptical or suspicious. Information increases our index of suspicion, which protects us.
Never answer calls or messages from unknown numbers. If it’s essential, they will leave a voicemail, which gives you time to slow down and verify the information. Also, if you answer spam phone calls, you are confirming to scammers and spammers that 1) your phone is linked to a human, and 2) you are answering calls. This makes your phone number more valuable, and scammers will sell it to other scammers, thereby increasing the number of spam phone calls you receive.
Protect your phone number and email addresses to prevent scammers from contacting you. Do this by creating alternate phone numbers and emails and sharing those instead of your primary email and phone number that you use with friends and family. Also, take steps to remove your information from data brokers. For more information, please refer to my previous posts on these topics.
Don’t post news of upcoming travel dates and locations online (bad actors look for such posts to find targets/victims). For example, if a bad actor knows you are traveling to the Bahamas, they could call a family member and claim there was an accident while you were traveling or that you are in prison in the Bahamas, and it will be more believable.
Don’t publicly post videos, images, and audio of yourself. Do your best to minimize the publicly available videos, images, and audio of yourself. These can be used to create impersonations of you. Here are some practical tips:
Don’t have a custom voicemail with your voice. Instead, use the automatic voicemail. Custom voicemail is an easy method for scammers to obtain a voice sample.
Don’t publicly post content on social media. If you post on social media, only expose it to connections or friends that you have proactively accepted.
Create a “codeword” or “password” that family members can ask for in an emergency to confirm that a loved one is really in trouble. This is a way to verify authenticity when talking to a family member.
The way this works is that, ahead of time, you set up a unique codeword that is not normally used in everyday speech and that only family members know to use. This can then be used as verification.
You can also use an App to generate unique code words. A founder I know created a helpful App for this called “CodeWord”, which you can download from the App Store at this link. It allows for unique, rotating codewords for individuals, which can be used to verify people. The downside is that this requires both people to have access to the App (or remember their codeword as it changes, which can be set to the longest interval of every week).
A note on “duress” codewords. Duress codewords are used to communicate subtly that the person communicating is under duress. An example of this would be a situation where a family member is forced to call home to say “everything is fine” when it really isn’t.
Duress codewords are something “unique”, but also something that could be brought up in an “everything is fine” conversation without the people forcing the call to realize that a message was passed. An example of a duress code word could be intentionally misnaming a pet. Another example could be a word like “Venmo” used in a statement like “don’t forget to Venmo Tate”.
The receiving end can help facilitate this by always asking a question, such as “Is there anything you need?” before ending a conversation, which allows the person under duress to answer and use the codeword.
Duress codewords may not be suitable for most people’s families and situations, but I wanted to share them as an option. Using duress codewords requires some practice and constant awareness by all parties.
Stay Safe!
Tate
Creating a family authenticator app is certainly creative.