Artificial intelligence needs as little as three seconds of you speaking to produce a convincing clone of your voice. In tests by cybersecurity firm McAfee, a three-second clip was enough to generate a clone with an 85% match to the original speaker.
That technology is increasingly showing up in scams. An estimated 15 million American adults were scammed out of money in 2025, losing roughly $68 billion, according to a survey by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance. The full report says 12% of the scams reported in the survey involved AI or a deepfake. That figure may undercount the problem, since victims don’t always realize AI was used.
