Chris Sampson was working from home in Missoula, Montana, when his cell phone lit up with a call that appeared to be from his adult daughter.
Sampson said her name and photo appeared on the caller ID and a familiar ringtone sounded. But when she answered, she heard a voice that sounded like her daughter’s crying.
“It was her voice. I know her screams of terror,” Sampson told CNBC Make It. “I thought maybe she had been in a car accident.”
A short time later, Sampson said, a man answered the phone. He spoke softly at first, giving her first name and asking if she was his daughter’s mother.
Then his tone changed. Sampson said he started yelling, threatening her and demanding money from her to keep her from calling the police or trying to get near her daughter.
Sampson said she has seen news articles about similar kidnapping scams. In the scam, callers pretended to be family members in distress and demanded money. But she says her daughter’s voice sounded so real that she didn’t want to risk getting it wrong. She says she then heard her daughter say “mom” and found it harder to believe it was a scam.
“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Sampson said.
It was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.
Sampson said she told the caller she was sending money, but the caller became aggressive and kept asking her to “talk to my daughter.” She said the caller requested money through PayPal, but never specified an amount.
Sampson said her sister, who was with her at the time, called 911, but the caller periodically hung up and called back. Sampson used the gap to try to contact her family and her daughter’s workplace in Helena, Montana, about two hours away.
She says her panic worsened when she could no longer contact her daughter directly. But about 15 to 20 minutes after the initial call, Sampson’s daughter was found at work after briefly leaving her desk. Shortly after that, the call stopped and never resumed. The caller was not identified, Sampson said.
In the weeks that followed, Sampson said she was shaken by the experience. She has become more cautious at home, double-checking her locks and paying close attention to her surroundings. She also changed the settings on her phone.
“I never want to hear that ringtone again,” she says.
Sampson said detectives told her there was little police could do because the calls were difficult to trace. Missoula police did not discuss Sampson’s situation specifically, but said they have received reports of similar scams in which callers pretend to be family members and ask for money.
“What has evolved in recent years is the level of sophistication,” said Officer Whitney Bennett, a spokeswoman for the Missoula Police Department.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, the most commonly reported type of fraud complaint last year was identity fraud. By 2025, the number of infected people will have increased by about 19% to about 1 million people, and the loss will have reached more than $3.5 billion.
Even picking up the phone poses new risks, as scammers deploy tools that can mimic voices and carry out conversations in real-time.
Why answering the phone feels different than before
Ian Bednowicz, general manager of identity and privacy at identity theft protection company LifeLock, said voice-based fraud is changing the way people use their phones.
For decades, hearing a familiar voice or seeing a known number was often enough to demonstrate trust. That assumption is crumbling, Bednowicz said, as scammers have access to tools that can mimic voices and spoof caller ID.
“You shouldn’t answer the phone, especially if it’s an unknown or unexpected call,” he says. This includes calls that appear to come from your bank or the Internal Revenue Service. The bureau said the IRS typically initiates communications by mail and does not typically make phone calls demanding immediate payment or threatening arrest.
Even if the call appears to be from someone you know, it could be a spoof. Most of the time, scammers don’t need much to make a call feel genuine. If you are impersonating someone you know, limited information may be enough.
Short clips taken from social media, voicemails and other recordings can be used to generate a synthetic version of someone’s voice, Bednowicz said. That voice is combined with a disguised caller ID and personal information (name, workplace, family relationships) to create a call that feels immediate and tangible.
Michael Bruemmer, Experian’s vice president of global data breaches and consumer protection, said voice cloning tools can now work with very short audio samples, in some cases as short as three seconds.
At the same time, the scale of these scams has also changed. Bednowicz said fraud has become “industrialized,” with organized networks running coordinated operations across borders. He said the companies, many based in Asia and Africa, are run like businesses, with employees handling calls, scripts and outreach at scale. In some cases, he says, these workers themselves can become victims, being recruited under false pretenses and coerced into committing fraud.
According to Bednowicz’s testimony before the House Financial Services Subcommittee in September 2025, more than 75% of cybercrime is now attributable to these scams and social engineering tactics.
These scams are also rapidly increasing. According to the Federal Trade Commission, losses from social media fraud alone have increased eightfold since 2020, reaching approximately $2.1 billion by 2025.
The number is likely to increase in the future. In a 2025 study at Rutgers University, researcher Sanket Bade built an AI system that can operate autonomously and execute fraudulent calls end-to-end. “There were no humans involved in this interaction loop,” he says.
He says cost, performance and latency continue to limit the extent to which large-scale language modeling techniques can be deployed in fraud. But “as the performance of smaller, faster models continues to improve, this will become an imminent threat.”
How to deal with voice fraud
The first step to avoiding scams is often not to answer the phone at all.
“I call it JDA, but don’t answer the phone,” says Experian’s Bruemmer.
If the caller claims to be a family member in distress, you can hang up and try to contact them through another number, your workplace, or a trusted contact. Bloomer also suggests choosing secret words or asking questions that only family members would know so you can immediately tell if the situation is real.
Even with these safeguards in place, some personal information may already be available. “Tone down your social media presence,” Bloomer says. Avoid posting “photos, public speeches, or places where long voices can be heard.” This is because these recordings can be sampled to produce fake audio.
Sampson said her family now uses slang. She said detectives told her the only real defense is awareness, and she’s sharing her story so others don’t fall for the same kind of calls.
“I’m determined to spread the word so this poor mother doesn’t have to go through what I went through,” she says.
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