AI voice scam tricks California mother out of $5,400 in kidnapping hoax
A Martinez mother says a five-hour phone hoax used her daughter’s cloned voice to extract $5,400 before she learned Sarah was safe at work.
Deborah Del Mastro says a voice that sounded exactly like her 37-year-old daughter lured her into a five-hour panic and cost her $5,400 before the lie unraveled. The Martinez, California, mother said the call began with an unknown number and a male voice telling her, “someone you need to talk to.”
Del Mastro said the caller claimed Sarah had been kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel after seeing something she was not supposed to see. Then came the part designed to overwhelm any parent: audio that sounded like Sarah crying in terror, saying, “I love you, mom, I’m so sorry, I’m so scared.” Del Mastro said the pressure never let up as the callers kept her on the phone and directed her to wire money to Mexico from multiple locations.
By Del Mastro’s account, the ordeal lasted about five hours and ended with her sending $5,400. She was told Sarah would be released at a grocery store. When Del Mastro arrived and could not find her daughter, she called Sarah directly and learned the truth: Sarah was safe and at work.
The scam fits a growing pattern that investigators and victim advocates say has been accelerated by AI voice cloning. Erin West of Operation Shamrock said scammers can recreate a voice from just a few seconds of audio, often lifted from social media clips or ordinary phone calls. She described the trend as a “scamdemic” and said any urgent request for money should be treated as a warning sign.
The cases are not isolated. Jennifer DeStefano described a similar kidnapping hoax in 2023, and NBC Miami reported a 2025 case in Florida in which a woman lost $15,000 after scammers cloned her daughter’s voice and demanded fake bail money. In those cases, as in Del Mastro’s, the tactic depended on speed, fear and the instinct to act before checking.
Del Mastro said her family now shares locations through their phones, a practical layer of verification that can cut through panic when a call sounds real but is not. West recommended families use a code word to confirm identity, and urged people to treat urgent money requests as a red flag. Del Mastro also said not to answer random numbers.
The Federal Trade Commission says fraud reports submitted through ReportFraud.ftc.gov are shared with more than 2,000 law-enforcement partners, a system meant to spot patterns even when individual victims are isolated. But the Martinez case shows how AI impersonation can move faster than the safeguards around it, exploiting the few minutes when fear matters more than doubt.
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