A mother from Arizona described a harrowing action perpetrated against her when scammers used artificial intelligence to simulate her daughter’s terrified voice in a fake kidnapping to induce the mom to pay a ransom.

Jennifer DeStefano testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and related the ordeal she suffered in April when she received a phone call demanding $1 million in order for her 15-year-old daughter Brie to be returned to her. Brie has no public social media accounts, but she has been interviewed for school and sports.

“How many times have you received a phone call from your child and asked them to verify who is calling?” DeStefano began. “How many times has a loved one reached out to you in despair and you stopped them to validate their identity? Did you hang up on them? Did you require to call them back to make sure you are speaking to the correct person? The answer is more than likely, never.”

DeStefano noted that on that “typical Friday afternoon for our family kicking off a weekend of races and rehearsals that often divide our family across the state,” her husband was with Brie and their youngest son training for ski races while she was with their older son and youngest daughter.

“When I first received a call from an ‘unknown’ number upon exiting my car, I was going to ignore it,” she recalled. “On the final ring I chose to answer as ‘unknown’ calls can often be a doctor or a hospital. I answered the phone ‘Hello,’ On the other end was our daughter Briana sobbing and crying saying ‘mom.’”

DeStefano said she wasn’t worried as Brie had “run into race gates and bruised herself before.” But Brie’s voice continued, “Mom, I messed up” with more crying and sobbing. “Okay, what happened?” DeStefano asked.

“Suddenly a man’s voice barked at her to ‘lay down and put your head back,’” DeStefano told the committee.  “At that moment I started to panic. My concern escalated and I demanded to know what was going on, but nothing could have prepared me for her response. ‘MOM THESE BAD MEN HAVE ME, HELP ME, HELP ME!!’”

DeStefano said her daughter’s voice “begged and pleaded as the phone was taken from her,” and a “threatening and vulgar man took over the call.”

“Listen here, I have your daughter, you tell anyone, you call the cops, I am going to pump her stomach so full of drugs, I am going to have my way with her, drop her in Mexico and you’ll never see her again!” the man said while Brie’s voice in the background desperately pleaded, “Mom, help me!!!”

DeStefano said she started screaming for help, prompting one mother to call 911. “The next few minutes were a parent’s worst nightmare,” she said. The kidnapper demanded a million dollars but settled for $50,000 in cash.

“At this moment, the mom who called 911 came inside and shared with me that 911 was familiar with an AI scam where they can replicate your loved one’s voice,” DeStefano said. “I didn’t believe this was a scam. It wasn’t just Brie’s voice; it was her cries, it was her sobs that were unique to her.”

But the mom told DeStefano that AI can also replicate inflection and emotion.

The man on the phone yelled at DeStefano, who said she would wire him the money, “That’s traceable, that’s not how this is going to go down. We are going to come pick you up. … You will agree to being picked up in a white van, with a bag over your head so you don’t know where we are taking you. You better have all $50k in cash otherwise both you and your daughter are dead! If you don’t agree to this, you will never see your daughter again!”

Finally, DeStefano was able to get her husband on the phone, with another mom’s help. “He frantically located Brie resting safely in bed,” she recalled.

But DeStefano had been so traumatized that she wanted to make sure her daughter’s voice was real. “I asked her over and over again if it was really her, if she was really safe, again, is this really Brie, are you sure you are really safe?” she said.

“They continued to threaten to kill Brie,” she said of the ransomers. “When I called the police to pursue the matter, unfortunately I was met with: This is a prank call.”

“But that wasn’t the end; it couldn’t be the end,” she said. “If it was the end, then this nightmare would never stop. I stayed up all night paralyzed in fear. Do they know where I am? Do they know where my daughter is? How did they get her voice? How did they get her crying, her sobs that are unique to her. She is not a very public person. Are we being cyber stalked? Targeted?”

“I will never be able to shake that voice out of mind. It’s every parents’ worst nightmare to hear your child pleading with fear and pain, knowing that they are being harmed and you are helpless and desperate. The longer this form of terror remains unpunishable, the farther and more egregious it will become,” she declared.

“Is this our new norm? Is this the future we are creating by enabling this abuse of Artificial Intelligence without consequence?” she concluded.