A woman in Florida sent $15,000 in retirement savings to a phone scammer who used artificial intelligence to clone her daughter’s voice and pretended she was in trouble.
Sharon Brightwell reportedly got a call last Wednesday that sounded exactly like her adult daughter, April Monroe, sobbing and panicking on before telling her that she had hit a heavily pregnant woman while texting and driving.
The phone number didn’t match Monroe’s, and the voice claimed that the police had taken her personal cellphone after the accident. But the AI-generated sound was so similar to her daughter’s voice, even her sobs, that Brightwell was completely convinced the call was real.
“There is nobody that could convince me that it wasn’t her. I know my daughter’s cry. Even though she’s an adult, I know her cry,” Brightwell, of Hillsborough County, told WFLA.
Then, a man abruptly took over the call, claiming to be an attorney for her daughter. The man said he needed $15,000 so that they could post bond for Monroe.
“I said, ‘You have got to be kidding me,’” Brightwell said.
The fake attorney gave Brightwell some instructions, including telling her not to inform the bank what the money would be for, as it could negatively impact Monroe’s credit score.
Brightwell withdrew the required funds and placed it in a box at the direction of the so-called attorney. A driver showed up at her house, grabbed the package, and drove away.
Soon after, Brightwell received another phone call claiming that the pregnant victim’s child died following the accident and that the woman’s “Christian people” family wouldn’t sue Monroe if she posted another $30,000.
Brightwell only realized she had been scammed when she got a call from her grandson, telling her that his mom was not in any trouble — he even put Monroe on the phone.
“I screamed. When I heard her voice, I broke down. She was fine,” Brightwell said.
“After you hear your child in distress, all logic is out the window,” Monroe added in a GoFundMe to help her parents recoup the money lost to the scam.
“To tell you the trauma that my mom and son went through that day makes me nauseous and has made me lose more faith in humanity. Evil is too nice a word for the kind of people that can do this. My mother was sobbing on the phone with them, thinking I had been not only in a horrific wreck, but that a baby’s life had been taken. The scammers continued without hesitation or remorse.”
The family believe that the scammer used videos of Brightwell’s daughter on Facebook and Snapchat to generate a near-perfect replica of her voice.
