‘Silent' phone call scam on the rise in France: what is it and why it is so dangerous

Cybersecurity experts are warning residents in France about a new ‘silent’ call scam that can be used to steal an individual’s identity.

Scammers will call a number, however when a victim picks up they will not say anything and keep silent. 

This will naturally prompt the person on the other end to speak, with words such as ‘hello’, ‘who’s there?’ or ‘I can’t hear you’. 

These are all it takes for fraudsters to steal a victim’s voice, however, warns cybersecurity company Bitdefender.

AI software can mimic victim’s voice

Scammers can cross-reference a person’s voice with information they already hold about them, often collected through phishing attempts or obtained via the dark web. 

France has been subject to several recent major cyberattacks, targeting both public and private databases. 

If the victim’s voice matches the information they hold about them, scammers will either hang up or wait for the other person to end the call, with the recipient often thinking little of the incident.

However, fraudsters can use sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence) software to mimic a person’s voice, intonations, and way of speaking, based on anything they said during the call – even if this was just a simple word or two.

Once trained, the ‘AI’ voice can then be used to impersonate the victim in phone calls.

Scammers are able to feed information to the software during the call to provide real-time responses, as if they were having a genuine conversation.

This can enable fraudsters to access personal services, such as a victim’s bank accounts, by impersonating them when contacting customer support lines – especially if they already have additional personal information obtained through a previous cyberattack.

It can also be used to call people such as family members, pretending to be the victim directly and asking for further personal and sensitive information that can be used to steal their identity.

Alternatively, once a number has been verified as belonging to an individual, scammers can resell it on the dark web along with the information that the person answers their phone – details that may prove useful to other fraudsters.

How to reduce risk 

It can be difficult to spot the scams, as fraudsters often call from seemingly mundane numbers (mobile phones, etc), and not the usual ones associated with spam calls. 

This leads victims to be more likely to answer in the first place, and to speak when they do not hear anyone at the other end of the line. 

The best advice to avoid these scams remains simply to not speak first when answering the phone.

If you answer a call and no one is speaking on the other end of the line – or a voice simply asks you to confirm your identity – do not say anything, and give them a few seconds. 

If they continue to stay silent, hang up, and do not call them back or you may be charged premium rates.

If a call was genuine, you will soon receive another call (and the person on the other line will speak first), or be contacted through another form of communication such as text or email. 

Block any numbers that call you and do not say anything, and if possible report them.