A phone call from a panicked grandchild. A voicemail from your bank’s fraud department. An email from your CFO asking for an urgent wire. None of these used to be hard to sort from a fake, since fakes had tells: odd phrasing, a wrong voice, a misspelled domain. Artificial intelligence has quietly removed most of those tells, and the tools that make convincing fakes now cost almost nothing and require almost no skill to use.
Voice cloning is the clearest example. A few seconds of audio, pulled from a voicemail greeting or a video posted online, is enough to recreate someone’s voice closely enough that even people who know them well cannot reliably tell the difference on a phone call. Criminals use this to impersonate a family member in distress, asking for money to be wired immediately for bail, a medical bill, or a stranded car. The urgency is the point. It is designed to short circuit the moment where you would normally stop and verify. The best defense is a simple one. Agree on a family safe word or phrase in advance, something a caller could not guess, and treat any urgent request for money as a reason to hang up and call the person back directly at a number you already have, not one provided during the call.
The same technology has made phishing considerably harder to spot. Emails and texts that once gave themselves away through clumsy grammar or generic greetings can now be written, personalized, and sent at scale, often referencing real details pulled from social media or previous data breaches to seem credible. A message that gets your name, your employer, and a recent purchase right feels trustworthy in a way a generic one never did. The underlying advice has not changed, but it matters more than ever: verify requests for money or sensitive information through a separate channel and treat urgency and personalization as reasons for more scrutiny, not less.
Synthetic identity fraud is a newer and less visible problem. Rather than stealing one person’s full identity, criminals now assemble identities from a blend of real information, a real Social Security number paired with a fabricated name and history, and use AI to generate the supporting documents needed to open accounts or pass verification checks. Because no single person is being directly impersonated, it often goes undetected longer than traditional identity theft. A credit freeze is a particularly effective defense, since it blocks new credit from being opened against a Social Security number at all, fabricated identity or not, and is worth considering even for numbers not in active use, a child’s, for instance. Regularly reviewing your credit report remains the most direct way to catch unfamiliar activity, even when the fraud itself does not look like a clean identity theft case.
Video is catching up to voice. Deepfake video calls, once easy to spot through flickering or unnatural movement, have become convincing enough to fool people on live calls, including in cases where an employee approved a large wire transfer after what appeared to be a video call with company executives. For individuals, this risk shows up less often than voice scams do, but the underlying principle holds: a video or voice call is no longer, on its own, sufficient proof of who you are speaking with, particularly when the request involves money or sensitive information. Caller ID can be spoofed to display a real institution’s number, so it should be treated as a hint rather than confirmation.
These habits build on the same discipline from before, adjusted for a threat that no longer looks or sounds the way fraud used to. A callback to a known number, a family safe word, a credit freeze, healthy skepticism toward urgency, and regular review of your credit and accounts will catch most of what AI powered fraud is designed to slip past. The technology behind these scams will keep improving, but the discipline of verifying before acting does not go out of date.
Disclosure:
This material is provided by Gryphon Financial Partners, LLC (“Gryphon”) for informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for personalized investment advice or as a recommendation or solicitation of any particular security, strategy, or investment product. Facts presented have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, though Gryphon cannot guarantee their accuracy or completeness. Gryphon does not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. Individuals should seek such guidance from qualified professionals based on their specific circumstances.