The Safe Word: How to Stop an AI Voice Scam
Pick one word your family agrees on and never writes down anywhere. When a caller sounds frightened and asks for money, ask for the word. Software that copied your grandson’s voice from a birthday video has his voice. It does not have his life, and it cannot answer.
That is the whole defense. It is free, it takes five minutes, and there is nothing to sign up for. Type your word below and print the cards.
Our family word
Buttercup
If a caller asks for money, ask for this word first.
gage.academy/safe-word
If the call sounds like family and asks for money
- 1. Say you will call them back. Then hang up. A real emergency survives a hang up.
- 2. Call them on the number you already had. Never a number the caller gave you.
- 3. Ask for the word.
- 4. Never send cash, gift cards, a wire or crypto because of a phone call. No real agency, bank or court asks for those.
- 5. Tell one other person before you send anything. Secrecy is the ask that gives the scam away.
gage.academy/safe-word
Ask for it before you send anything.
Why a word beats a voice
Copying a voice used to take a studio. It now takes seconds of audio and a consumer tool, and the audio is already public: a voicemail greeting, a graduation speech, a church service streamed on Facebook, any video where somebody speaks for a moment.
This is why “I would know my own daughter’s voice” has stopped being protection. You would know the voice. The voice is the part they have.
A safe word works because it inverts the test. Instead of asking whether something sounds real, which is now a coin toss, you ask for a fact that was never recorded. There is nothing for the software to have copied. The caller cannot bluff it, cannot search for it, and cannot talk their way past it, and the way they react when you ask is itself the answer.
How common this is
Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Annual Report. Older adults filed one in five complaints and accounted for 37 percent of all reported losses. The Federal Trade Commission’s December 2025 report to Congress notes the real total is far higher, because most of it is never reported.
What we will not do
We do not clone anyone’s voice to demonstrate voice cloning, not for a video, not for a lesson, and not for a scary example on a page like this one. Where our program plays a scam call, it is actors reading a script. A company that manufactures the exact harm it warns you about has nothing worth selling you.
The same goes for the word you typed above. It stays in your browser. We never receive it, so we can never lose it.
Want the rest of it in the post?
We are printing a large print field guide that walks through the twelve scripts these callers actually use and exactly what to say to end each one, along with the three cards on heavy stock. Leave your email and we will tell you the day it is ready. No card, nothing to cancel.
If money has already gone
Act in the next hour instead of deciding it is hopeless. Call the bank or card issuer and ask them to recall the transfer, because some wires and card payments can still be stopped. If gift cards were sent, call the card issuer with the numbers and the receipts, since part of the balance is often still unspent. Report it at ic3.gov and reportfraud.ftc.gov, which is how separate cases get connected to the same operation.
Then tell somebody. Shame is what keeps these losses invisible and what lets the same crew work the same neighbourhood for another year. This was done to you by people who do it for a living.
Questions
What is a safe word and how does it stop an AI voice scam?
A safe word is one word your family agrees on in advance and never writes in a message or says on social media. When somebody calls sounding frightened and asking for money, you ask for the word. Software that has copied a relative's voice from a video or a voicemail cannot know a word that was never recorded anywhere, so the caller either changes the subject, gets angry, or hangs up. All three are your answer.
How much audio does someone need to clone a voice?
Seconds. Consumer voice tools now work from very short samples, and the samples are easy to find: a birthday video, an outgoing voicemail greeting, a graduation speech, a church service streamed on Facebook. There is no need to target you specifically for this to be possible, which is why the defense has to be something that was never recorded rather than something you can hear.
What should our safe word be?
Something specific to your family and impossible to guess from anything public. A dog you had when the children were small, a joke nobody outside the family understood, the name of a street you lived on before social media existed. Avoid birthdays, pet names you post about, middle names, and anything that appears in a public profile. Agree it out loud in person or on a call you started, never in a text or an email, and do not store it in your phone's notes.
What do I do if I get a call like this right now?
Say you will call them back, and hang up. A real emergency survives a hang up. Then call the person on the number you already had in your phone, never a number the caller gave you, and ask for the word. Do not send cash, gift cards, a wire transfer or cryptocurrency because of a phone call, because no real bank, court, police force or government agency asks for those. Tell one other person before you send anything at all, because the demand for secrecy is usually the clearest sign of the scam.
How common are these scams?
Americans aged 60 and over filed 201,266 complaints with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2025 and reported 7.75 billion dollars in losses, an increase of 59 percent over the year before, with an average loss of 38,500 dollars per victim. Older adults filed one in five complaints and accounted for 37 percent of all losses reported. The Federal Trade Commission estimates the true cost is far higher than what is reported, because most people never report it.
I already sent money. Is it too late?
Act in the next hour rather than deciding it is hopeless. Call your bank or card issuer immediately and ask them to recall or reverse the transfer, because some wires and card payments can still be stopped. If you sent gift cards, call the card issuer with the numbers and receipts, since a portion is sometimes still unspent. Report it to the FBI at ic3.gov and to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, which is how these cases get connected to each other. Then tell somebody you trust. Shame is what keeps these losses invisible, and this was done to you by people who do it professionally.
Does GAGE record or store our safe word?
No. The word you type on this page stays in your browser. It is never sent to us, never saved, and never included in any measurement. That is also why we ask you to print the card while you are here, because closing the tab genuinely erases it.
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