State Department Investigates High-Level Scam

The U.S. State Department says it’s investigating a scam in which an unknown person is posing as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio when contacting powerful government officials.

The fraudster has reached out to at least three foreign ministers, a U.S. senator and a governor via text, popular encrypted messaging platform Signal and voicemail, according to a July 3 internal state department memo first reported by The Washington Post and confirmed by several other publications, including the Guardian. The identity of the politicians on the receiving end of the fake Rubio messages has not been released, nor has the content of the communication.

While it’s unclear who’s behind the scam, the goal appears to be gaining access to information or accounts of high-level government players.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on the Rubio scam, but said in the cable that “there is no direct cyber threat to the department from this campaign, but information shared with a third party could be exposed if targeted individuals are compromised.”

The department also said it “takes seriously its responsibility to safeguard its information, and continuously takes steps to improve the department’s cybersecurity posture to prevent future incidents.”

As increasingly realistic AI voices proliferate in customer service, marketing and entertainment, it’s getting harder to distinguish between synthetic and human voices. That realism can, of course, serve a purpose — take the “AI granny” expressly created to waste scammers’ time by keeping them on the phone as long as possible in a bid to annoy and frustrate them. But vocal clones can also easily spread misinformation and could hold serious implications for national security.

“It was only a matter of time,” David Axelrod, former senior political adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote on X of the Rubio impersonation. “This is the new world in which we live and we’d better figure out how to defend against it because of its implications for our democracy and the world.”

This is not the first time AI-generated voices have been used to impersonate government officials. Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission outlawed AI-generated robocalls after a surge in deepfakes made to sound like political candidates. These included deepfake robocalls from then-President Joe Biden promoting fraudulent views to New Hampshire voters before the state’s primary in January.