Cognitive Heists series #3: The Call Is Coming from Inside Your Mind

2025-07-25

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📞 The Call Is Coming from Inside Your Mind Welcome to #3 of the "Cognitive Heists" series. The Voice in Your Head -- Authority, Audio Deepfakes, and the Power of a Familiar Voice In 2019, a UK energy firm received a call. The voice on the other end sounded exactly like the CEO of their German parent company. The request? Transfer €220,000 immediately to a trusted vendor. It wasn’t the CEO. It was a deepfake. This was the first confirmed deepfake voice fraud used to commit corporate theft—and it’s onl...

📞 The Call Is Coming from Inside Your Mind

Welcome to #3 of the "Cognitive Heists" series. The Voice in Your Head -- Authority, Audio Deepfakes, and the Power of a Familiar Voice

In 2019, a UK energy firm received a call. The voice on the other end sounded exactly like the CEO of their German parent company.

The request? Transfer €220,000 immediately to a trusted vendor. It wasn’t the CEO. It was a deepfake.

This was the first confirmed deepfake voice fraud used to commit corporate theft—and it’s only the beginning.

This issue dives into:

🎧 Why voice is one of the most powerful trust signals—and why that’s dangerous now

😨 How vishing, voice cloning, and audio deepfakes hijack your certainty

👻 A classic urban legend (yep—the babysitter and the call from inside the house)

🧠 The psychology of obedience, panic, and auditory illusion

🧯 And how to train your brain to pause the response before the wire transfer

In a world where your boss’s voice can be faked, what part of your brain do you not listen to?

A couple relevant sources related to AI based voice scams:

[PROVED] Unsuspecting Call Recipients Are Super Vulnerable to AI Vishing: (this is my story about having an AI voice bot participate in DEFCON's Social Engineering Community Capture the Flag competition). https://blog.knowbe4.com/proved-unsuspecting-call-recipients-are-super-vulnerable-to-ai-vishing
Seeing (and Hearing) Isn’t Believing: My SEC Presentation on AI-Driven Scams: https://blog.knowbe4.com/seeing-and-hearing-isnt-believing-my-sec-presentation-on-ai-driven-scams

The FAIK Files: AI Oopsies!

Audio version: https://pod.link/1771521321/episode/af214a2812ad672b675870a9fb56f4cb
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY31aE5-PxA

TechCrunch story: Google’s Gemini panicked when playing Pokémon: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/googles-gemini-panicked-when-playing-pokemon/

P.S. -- Just a quick reminder that I've got a great book out that's all about deepfakes, disinformation, and deception. Be sure to check it out if you haven't already: https://ThisBookIsFAIK.com.

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