- Joined
- Apr 7, 2016
- Location
- Indiana, US
This comes from my company's tech team. There has been a huge increase in phone calls to our phones where no one is on the other end of the call. Is the call is answered, there is silence until you disconnect the call. If it goes to voice mail, there is a roughly 20 second message of total silence and the call disconnects.
They believe this is a voice harvesting scam, obtain voice samples from either voice mail greetings or from the person answering the call. Those samples can later be used to create an entire message in your voice for criminal purposes, such as calling a family member and saying you've been kidnapped and to pay X amount of dollars or you'll be killed. It will sound like your voice to your family members, so it's a very concerning development.
Current advice is to remove any personalized voice mail greeting using your voice or stating your name. Switch to your carrier's generic greeting that only states your phone number. Also, if receiving a call from an unknown number, either don't answer or don't give them enough of your voice to sample if you do. I'm going to start saying " 'lo" instead of "hello." If there is no response don't say anything else at all.
This scenario is absolutely possible with today's technology. They are looking into technical solutions as well, but we're implementing what I described above immediately. Just FYI.
They believe this is a voice harvesting scam, obtain voice samples from either voice mail greetings or from the person answering the call. Those samples can later be used to create an entire message in your voice for criminal purposes, such as calling a family member and saying you've been kidnapped and to pay X amount of dollars or you'll be killed. It will sound like your voice to your family members, so it's a very concerning development.
Current advice is to remove any personalized voice mail greeting using your voice or stating your name. Switch to your carrier's generic greeting that only states your phone number. Also, if receiving a call from an unknown number, either don't answer or don't give them enough of your voice to sample if you do. I'm going to start saying " 'lo" instead of "hello." If there is no response don't say anything else at all.
This scenario is absolutely possible with today's technology. They are looking into technical solutions as well, but we're implementing what I described above immediately. Just FYI.