Fox 5 News reporter Teresa Priolo interviews a victim, identified only as Stephanie, who was duped by an AI‑generated voice that mimicked her sister’s phone. The scammer claimed the sister was being held hostage and demanded money via Zelle, threatening to kill her if police were involved. Stephanie, panicked, transferred what she could, but the sister was later found asleep at home after a welfare check. Security expert Robert Siciliano explains that scammers harvest video and audio from social‑media platforms (Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Reels) to train a fraud‑GPT voice model that can produce a convincing, continuous conversation. The segment also offers practical advice: ask the caller personal, unshareable questions, stay calm, and verify identity before sending money. The story illustrates the emerging threat of AI‑assisted social‑engineering scams and how ordinary users can protect themselves.
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Warning tonight after a woman is scammed into thinking that her sister was kidnapped.
Okay, Teresa Priolo caught up with the victim who shared her harrowing story.
What am I going to tell my mom if she dies? It was Monday night. Stephanie, who asked that we only use her first name, had just finished a FaceTime with her mom and sister. They said good night and she went to bed, only to be startled by a phone call from what appeared to be her sister's cell phone.
It was not her on the other line, but a man The man said that he had my sister, that he would blow her brains out if I did not send him X amount of money.
A hostage situation with Stephanie's sister as the victim, held in her New York City apartment. The only way out alive was cash.
He was saying that he just got out of jail, that he needed to get home, he needed money to get back home. He started, um, asking me for the Zelle, for Zelle payments, and that was the first payment I made.
Complicating things, a woman is in the background screaming, pleading, and crying. Stephanie was panicking. She logged on to Find My iPhone. Her sister's phone pinged to the apartment, so she was home.
She has this, this way she cries. She has this hiccup in her cry, and I swear to God, that's what I heard in the cry as well. So to me, it was just— it was real.
She transferred what money she could, but it wasn't enough. The man warned, don't get the police involved or your sister's dead. Then the call disconnects.
And I tried— we died— we tried it from another phone. We tried it from my cousin's phone, and she was not answering.
Eventually, the family contacted the sister's doorman and asked him to do a welfare check. The sister answered the door. She had been asleep the entire time. Turns out this was an AI-assisted scam with a brazen sophistication that's rarely seen. We wondered how something like this could happen. Where did they get the number, the voice, the information, the ability to have a continuous conversation without hiccups? Or interruptions.
They grab information off of Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook Reels, whatever the case is, anything where there's video with audio. They can grab all that likeness of that person, put it into a fraud GPT generator and create the exact likeness.
The experts say there is one way you can tell if in fact this is a fake, and that is to ask the person on the other line a question that they wouldn't know the answer to. What did we have for dinner last night? What is our favorite restaurant? Tell me what color hair my sister has. Questions that they would have to be human to know. But they also tell us, you gotta make sure that you are calm, cool, and collected in these kinds of situations. In Bergen County, New Jersey, Teresa Priolo, Fox 5 News.
