BILLINGS — "Grandparent scams," where a scammer poses as a family member in danger to entice a false ransom, have been around for years, but with recent AI technology, they have become more sophisticated. One Billings woman fell victim to one and is now hoping to warn others.
Juel Graham was on her lunch break Friday afternoon when she received a call from her daughter's ex-boyfriend, who told her that someone had called him saying her daughter had been in a terrible car accident and was headed to the hospital. While still on the phone, she received a call from an unknown Colstrip number. She answered, hoping to hear her daughter's voice.
“It was my daughter. She said, 'Mom, I really messed up. Please help me,' and then a man came on the phone and said, 'I have your daughter. If you want to see her again, you'll do exactly what I say,'" said Graham.
The man on the phone told her to take the call off speaker phone and her car's Bluetooth, threatening her to keep the phone to her face the entire time. He then told her that she had been injured in an accident, but that she had "messed up badly." Another man then called her other phone line, claiming his boss would give her instructions on what to do. They first had her drive to Walmart on King Avenue West and told her she needed to pay them $1,000.
"I said, 'I don’t have that.' He said, 'How much do you have?' I told him. He said, 'Okay, that's my money now,' said Graham.
Graham was instructed to withdraw several hundred dollars from the bank and take it to a local business, Colima de Mis Amores, a Mexican grocery store that has an international bank transfer. The money was wired to a bank in Mexico. MTN reached out to the store, and managers there said they were unaware of the scam. The bank that she sent the money to is a common bank in Mexico frequently sourced in these types of scams. After learning about the scam, the store owners reached out to the police as well.
The man told her to throw away the receipt, scribble out the address, and drive back to Walmart.
Throughout the drive, she could hear her daughter's voice in the background, and she once asked to speak with her to assure her that she was going to be okay. After that exchange, the men did not allow her daughter to speak anymore.
At Walmart, they then told her to drive to retailer's other Billings location on Main Street instead. While stuck in traffic, she could hear another call trying to come in. This time, it was her children.
“Didn't make it all the way there before my other kids were calling me back to back to back. I told them, 'Hey, I got to take this. I'll keep one of the lines on, but I have to take this call.' Then my daughter called me. I knew she was okay,” said Graham.
The call had been a scam. There was no hostage situation, and her daughter was safe. The scammers had initially attempted to scam the daughter's ex-boyfriend, but once they found that he was not her parent, they asked for a parent contact, leading him to give them Graham's information. She called the police the next day to make a report and learned that while these types of scams are common, the use of AI voice technology made her believe that it was her daughter on the phone.
“I was convinced she was there. There was no doubt in my mind that it was her," said Graham. “Worst phone call of my life. Worst hour of my life.”
“Sadly, we are hearing stories like that more often than we would want,” said Dale Dixon, the chief innovation officer for Better Business Bureau's Great West Pacific Region. "The scam stays the same. The bad guys are using new tools to do the same old work."
Dixon said that the use of technology has helped make scammers' lives easier, especially when information can be easily found online.
“There are programs out there that if we feed that program just seconds of our voice and type a script in, the computer then can make audio of that voice saying whatever is typed into the compute and play that for somebody on the phone," said Dixon. “If our voice is out and about anywhere online, a recording of us, a YouTube video, Instagram short, whatever it is, it can be pulled and used against us in situations like this.”
A program called ElevenLabs can create realistic AI voice recreations and is commonly used for video dubbing or voice overs. For just $5 and a few minutes of recording voice audio, the AI can even recreate your own voice to be used, but that also means that anyone can easily do the same.
With the use of maps, scammers are able to not be in the same location and give the names of local places, tricking you into thinking that they are nearby.
“That's why it's important for us to realize that we we cannot believe everything we see, hear, read, especially in the digital age,” said Dixon.
Dixon said most people do not believe that they would fall victim to such scams, but scammers usually aim to trigger a fight-or-flight response in people, leading them to not think clearly. According to the Better Business Bureau, people ages 18-24 reported the highest median dollar loss of all groups at $155. Social media is the highest reported method of contact.
“The moment we say, 'It won't happen to me. I'm too smart. I can smell it a mile away,' is when you are most likely to fall victim,” said Dixon. "The bad guys major in psychology. They know how to take advantage of other human beings. They know how to influence human beings. They know how to use our brains against us in these situations.”
Graham shared her experience to Facebook, hoping to warn others and also show that she thought she would never fall for scam. Due to fear, she even forgot her own family safety measures during the exchange.
“Everything was just happening so fast. I had the phone to my head the whole time. If I tried to put it on speaker, he would say, 'Take me off speaker,' so I wasn't able to text anybody or do anything else,” said Graham. "If I knew then what I know now, I would have just hung up and called my daughter.”
While the technology can seem scary and advanced, there are ways to protect yourself. Dixon said to change passwords regularly to keep them secure, avoid answering calls from unknown numbers, and speak with family members about code words to use when things are wrong.
“This is an opportunity to have a conversation with family and just set the ground rules. Know that nobody in the family is going to call another member of the family and say, 'I'm in trouble, please send money now.' That just is not going to happen," said Dixon. "Ask a question that only the person would be able to answer."
A scammer can easily trick your emotions, so situational awareness is also important.
"When you do see or hear something that starts to trigger a level of curiosity, take a step back and give yourself some time to think. Taking that step alone will save people a lot of time, emotional stress and money,” said Dixon.
While Graham will not see her money come back, she hopes that her story will help warn others.
“It's really scary. I didn't give them the whole amount that they were asking for, but somebody could, you know, just hang up and call,” said Graham. "They've done this countless times and I didn't want it to happen to somebody else.”
