THE HOUSEHOLD GUIDE
Printable. Printable. Sourced, dated, and revised when the numbers move. A printable one-page guide for protecting your household against voice cloning and deepfake fraud.
A stranger can now copy a voice from about three seconds of recorded audio — a voicemail greeting, a video, a call someone answered. So the old test, "it sounded just like her", stopped working. Everything below replaces that test with something that still works: a rule you follow, instead of a judgement you make.Microsoft Research, VALL-E, January 2023: high-quality personalised speech from "only a 3-second enrolled recording of an unseen speaker", preserving the speaker's emotion and acoustic environment.
Four steps
Agree a code word
Pick one word or short phrase the whole family knows. Not a pet's name, not a birthday, not anything posted online. Anyone who calls claiming to be family in trouble must be able to say it.
Tell the people who need it most — grandparents, parents, anyone who might get the call — and do not write it in a message that could be read on a stolen phone.
Adopt the callback rule
Nobody sends money or gives out details on an incoming call. Hang up. Call back on the number already saved in the phone — never a number the caller gives you, and never by pressing redial.
This single rule defeats almost every version of this scam, because the caller cannot control the number you dial.
Memorise three sentences
The scam works by rushing you. Having the words ready means you do not have to think of them while frightened.
"I'm going to hang up and call you back." "I don't send money on a phone call." "I need to speak to someone else in the family first."Say them out loud once at the kitchen table. It feels silly and it is the part that works.
Decide who verifies
Name one person everyone can ring to check a suspicious call — and make sure everyone knows who that is before anything happens. Scammers rely on isolation and secrecy. A second person breaks it.
If that person is you, say so plainly: "Ring me first, any hour, and I will never be annoyed about it."
What these calls sound like
Two things are always present, whatever the story: urgency and secrecy. An accident, an arrest, a hospital, a legal problem — and a reason not to tell anyone else yet.
Take that pair as the alarm. Not the voice, not the accent, not the emotion — those are now cheap to fake. Urgency plus secrecy is the tell. A real emergency survives a five-minute callback; a scam does not.
Nobody should be embarrassed. These calls fool careful people — a finance professional at a major engineering firm authorised fifteen transfers totalling about US5.6 million after a video call with what appeared to be his own colleagues. Act quickly: call the bank immediately and ask about recall or reversal, then report it — in the US at reportfraud.ftc.gov and the FBI's IC3, elsewhere through your national fraud line. Then tell the family, because silence is what lets the same call work twice.Case detail: Hong Kong Police briefing, February 2024; the firm was identified in May 2024 and confirmed that fake voices and images were used and that no internal systems were compromised.
Why this page exists
In the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, Americans aged 60 and over reported roughly .7 billion in losses — the steepest of any age group. In the same report, artificial intelligence appeared as a tracked category for the first time in the centre's roughly twenty-five-year history: 22,364 complaints and 93,346,472 in reported losses. The bureau notes that figure is almost certainly an undercount, because it only counts cases where the victim recognised that AI was involved.Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report, published April 2026. Figures verified against the report PDF at ic3.gov and the FBI's own press release, August 2026.
Those are the people this page is for. Not because they are careless — because they are called more, and because the defences that protect them are social rather than technical.
Do not teach your family to be afraid of technology. Teach them one rule: verify by calling back. Fear makes people easier to manipulate, and it costs them the good uses of the same tools. A household that hangs up and rings back is protected, whether or not anyone in it can tell a real voice from a copied one.