Robocallers Used Sloppy Biden Deepfake To Try And Keep Voters From The Polls On Presidential Primary Day

It's equal parts annoying and bizarre that we've normalized the fact that scammers, scumbags, debt collectors, partisan operatives, and marketers have made the U.S.' primary voice communication platform largely unusable. Americans received 3.8 billion robocalls last month, and despite some modest inroads in fighting the problem, it continues to grow for reasons we've already well established.

This week the problem popped up again, after some anonymous political ratfuckers tried to keep voters from heading to the polls on January 23rd's presidential primary. The New Hampshire Attorney General's office says its investigating the ploy, and in a statement noted the calls use a (badly) deepfaked version of President Biden's voice to convince them to stay home:

The message, which was sent on January 21, 2024, stated your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday." Although the voice in the robocall sounds like the voice of President Biden, this message appears to be artificially generated based on initial indications."

Impressive sleuthing there, champs.

NBC has a recording of the clearly fake Biden voice call, and notes that the call spoofed the number of a prominent New Hampshire Democrat." While Biden's name wasn't actually on the New Hampshire ballot due to an intra-party scheduling feud, there was an active campaign by the spoofed caller in question to conduct a write-in campaign in the state. It's unclear how many voters received the calls.

There are, of course, numerous problems here. Voter data can easily be purchased from data brokers because corrupt federal officials refuse to regulate data brokers or pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era. At the same time, federal anti-robocalling efforts have been consistently undermined by lobbyists for legitimate companies that keep weakening consumer protections and boxing in regulators, and would prefer you think robocalling is a tactic exclusive to scammers.

So even if the perpetrators of this political ratfucking effort are identified, whether or not they're meaningfully penalized (by state and federal regulators that can't even competently find or fine robocallers most of the time) is an open question. And while this was by every indication a relatively minor scam of low quality, this kind of fusion of deepfakes and robocalling is only just heating up.