Identity verification used to be simple: if I hear your voice, it's you. That system's broken now with AI.

Cybersec solved this years ago with Zero Trust architecture. Time to apply the same logic to family & friends communications.

You get a call from your loved one. They're in trouble. Needs urgent money. Needs it now. The voice sounds right. The panic sounds real.

Your brain pattern-matches: that voice = I know them. But voice is now just another endpoint that can be compromised. We need to patch our social protocols.

AI scams run on urgency. They want you to panic and bypass verification. The exploit is your emotional response time.

Fix: Introduce friction. Any distress call demanding immediate money gets a mandatory pause. The more urgent the request, the more suspicious you should be.

Real emergencies can survive a sixty-second verification. Fake ones collapse under it.

Never trust the incoming channel. If I call from an unknown number claiming I lost my phone, treat the entire connection as compromised.

Fix: Hang up. Call my actual number. If no answer, call my wife or check location sharing. Do not stay on the line.

This is standard practice for password resets. Apply it to voice.

The scammer will try to keep you engaged: "Don't hang up, I only have one call". That's the tell. Hang up immediately.

We use two-factor authentication for email. We need it for voice.

Fix: Agree offline on a dull, specific question or code word, like “What did we eat on your birthday?” or a random phrase.

If they can't produce the token, terminate.

Keep it mundane, not sentimental, so AI or scammers can’t guess it from social media or obvious personal details.

I walked my parents through this last weekend. Created an infographic with nano-banana-pro and sent it to our group chat.

Your parent might think it's rude. That instinct made sense for fifty years. It doesn't anymore. That's not their fault. That's the social hack we need to collectively override. We've been conditioned to stay on the line, to not offend. Scammers exploit that. New rule: if you're offended by me verifying your identity, you're probably not me. Expect resistance. For people who lived decades when voice = identity, this feels like paranoia. It's not. Show them the headlines, walk through one scenario, then make it routine.

Why This Matters

This isn't paranoia. It's updating protocols for the current reality. We patched computers when viruses appeared. We learned not to click suspicious links. We adopted password managers when credential stuffing became common. Voice cloning is the next attack surface. The exploit is already live.

These protocols are calibrated for opportunistic mass scams, not sophisticated targeted attacks. If someone is willing to compromise your spouse's phone and location data to scam you specifically, you have bigger problems. But that's not the threat model for 99% of people. This handles the volume attacks already happening.

The fix isn't complicated: awareness plus a simple protocol. Write it down. Share it. Test it once.

Trust, but verify. Then verify again.

What's your family's protocol? I'm curious how others are handling this.

Identity verification used to be simple: if I hear your voice, it's you. That system's broken now with AI.

Cybersec solved this years ago with Zero Trust architecture. Time to apply the same logic to family & friends communications.

You get a call from your loved one. They're in trouble. Needs urgent money. Needs it now. The voice sounds right. The panic sounds real.

Your brain pattern-matches: that voice = I know them. But voice is now just another endpoint that can be compromised. We need to patch our social protocols.

AI scams run on urgency. They want you to panic and bypass verification. The exploit is your emotional response time.

Fix: Introduce friction. Any distress call demanding immediate money gets a mandatory pause. The more urgent the request, the more suspicious you should be.

Real emergencies can survive a sixty-second verification. Fake ones collapse under it.

Never trust the incoming channel. If I call from an unknown number claiming I lost my phone, treat the entire connection as compromised.

Fix: Hang up. Call my actual number. If no answer, call my wife or check location sharing. Do not stay on the line.

This is standard practice for password resets. Apply it to voice.

The scammer will try to keep you engaged: "Don't hang up, I only have one call". That's the tell. Hang up immediately.

We use two-factor authentication for email. We need it for voice.

Fix: Agree offline on a dull, specific question or code word, like “What did we eat on your birthday?” or a random phrase.

If they can't produce the token, terminate.

Keep it mundane, not sentimental, so AI or scammers can’t guess it from social media or obvious personal details.

I walked my parents through this last weekend. Created an infographic with nano-banana-pro and sent it to our group chat.

Your parent might think it's rude. That instinct made sense for fifty years. It doesn't anymore. That's not their fault. That's the social hack we need to collectively override. We've been conditioned to stay on the line, to not offend. Scammers exploit that. New rule: if you're offended by me verifying your identity, you're probably not me. Expect resistance. For people who lived decades when voice = identity, this feels like paranoia. It's not. Show them the headlines, walk through one scenario, then make it routine.

Why This Matters

This isn't paranoia. It's updating protocols for the current reality. We patched computers when viruses appeared. We learned not to click suspicious links. We adopted password managers when credential stuffing became common. Voice cloning is the next attack surface. The exploit is already live.

These protocols are calibrated for opportunistic mass scams, not sophisticated targeted attacks. If someone is willing to compromise your spouse's phone and location data to scam you specifically, you have bigger problems. But that's not the threat model for 99% of people. This handles the volume attacks already happening.

The fix isn't complicated: awareness plus a simple protocol. Write it down. Share it. Test it once.

Trust, but verify. Then verify again.

What's your family's protocol? I'm curious how others are handling this.