A woman in Florida was swindled into handing over thousands of dollars in retirement savings by a phone scammer who used artificial intelligence to clone her daughter’s voice and pretend she was in trouble.
Sharon Brightwell said she got a call last Wednesday that sounded exactly like her adult daughter, April Monroe, sobbing and panicking on the other end of the line and telling her that she had hit a heavily pregnant woman while texting and driving.
The phone number didn’t match Monroe’s, and the voice claimed that the police had taken her personal cellphone after the accident. But the AI-generated sound was so similar to her daughter’s voice — even her sobs — that Brightwell was completely convinced the call was real.
“There is nobody that could convince me that it wasn’t her. I know my daughter’s cry. Even though she’s an adult, I know her cry,” Brightwell, of Hillsborough County, told WFLA.
Then, a man abruptly took over the call, claiming to be an attorney for her daughter. The man said he needed $15,000 so that they could post bond for Monroe.
But, like a true scammer, the faux attorney gave Brightwell a shady set of instructions, including not telling the bank what the money would be for because it could negatively impact Monroe’s credit score.
Brightwell withdrew the required funds and placed it in a box at the direction of the so-called attorney. A driver showed up at her house, grabbed the package and drove away.
Soon after, Brightwell received another phone call claiming that the pregnant victim’s child died following the accident and that the woman’s “Christian people” family wouldn’t sue Monroe if she posted another $30,000.
Brightwell only realized she had been scammed when she got a call from her grandson revealing to her that his mom was not in any trouble — he even put Monroe on the phone.
“I screamed. When I heard her voice, I broke down. She was fine,” Brightwell said.
“After you hear your child in distress, all logic is out the window,” Monroe added in a GoFundMe to help her parents recoup the money lost to the scam.
“To tell you the trauma that my mom and son went through that day makes me nauseous and has made me lose more faith in humanity. Evil is too nice a word for the kind of people that can do this. My mother was sobbing on the phone with them, thinking I had been not only in a horrific wreck, but that a baby’s life had been taken. The scammers continued without hesitation or remorse.”
The family, stunned by how quickly matters had unraveled, believe that the scammer used videos of Brightwell’s daughter on Facebook and Snapchat to generate a near-perfect replica of her voice.
Going forward, they will be using code words to verify each other’s identities over the phone.
“I pray this doesn’t happen to anyone else. My husband and I are recently retired. That money was our savings,” Brightwell lamented.
The family filed a report with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.
