ST. LOUIS — We’ve got a new warning about a kidnapping scam in St. Louis. Suspects are again using voices generated with artificial intelligence to steal thousands of dollars from their frightened victims.

“A simple solution is to have a ‘safe’ word as a family,” said Jay Greenberg, the FBI-St. Louis Special Agent in Charge.

That simple family ‘safe’ can cut through the most sophisticated AI scams, he said. That would have likely been the case in the recent St. Louis case.

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Authorities give this account:

A professor in the medical field got a phone call at work saying her daughter, 16, had been kidnapped. During the call, the mother could hear her daughter’s voice screaming for help.  The suspect said he kidnapped the girl after they’d been involved in a car crash.

He ordered the mother to drive to Pete’s  Shur Save Market in U-City to wire him $3,000 for her daughter’s release, demanding the mother stay on the phone until she got to the store and wired the money, threatening to hurt her daughter otherwise.

It was a nearly two-hour ordeal. The daughter was actually safe at home the entire time.  There was no crash. She never screamed for help.

Imagine if the family had a ‘safe’ word.

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“Mom, grandma, or grandpa, anybody in that situation can simply say to the person on the other end of that phone who’s either pretending to be the victim or pretending to hold the victim, ‘ok, I’m ready to move forward.  Please don’t hurt my family member but I need to know what the safe word is,’” Greenberg said.  “’My daughter, my son, my grandmother, they all know the safe word. What is our family word?’  They won’t be able to generate that through artificial intelligence.”

The National Institutes of Health recently issued a warning after multiple workers were targeted using these same techniques.  Here’s an FBI link for common techniques used by criminals and tips to protect yourself.

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The FBI has a phrase for you to remember to help guard against this AI crime trend:

“Always doubt… check it out,” Greenberg said.  “We just always want to encourage people to try to get that one piece of corroboration that will help you stay in touch with your emotions and make good decisions in a crisis,” Greenberg said.

“It’s a lot of emotion to master and we recognize that.  Nobody who is victimized by this scam should feel bad about that.  They need to come forward and report it so we can see, ‘Is this trend rising? Do we need to put more resources on it? Do we need to have more discussions in the community about it?’”

Statistics certainly back that up:  from 2018 to 2022, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center had more than 3.25 million crime complaints, with losses totaling more than $27.5 billion.

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