Four little words can cost you real money, and they sound like the most harmless thing on earth. “Can you hear me?” You pick up, a voice asks it, and before your brain catches up, you do the polite thing. You say “yes.” That single word is the whole reason they called.
A random “Can you hear me?” from a number you don’t recognize should be your first warning sign that a call is trouble, according to a forensic accounting professor who literally wrote a book about the fraud business. The trick works because it feels rude to say nothing. Nobody wants to be the jerk who leaves a person hanging. Scammers built an entire play around that one instinct.
The one word they are fishing for
Your “yes” gets recorded. That is the entire point. The caller might fumble around and say “sorry, I’m having trouble with my headset” or “let me call you right back,” but a recorder is rolling the whole time. Later, that clip of you saying “yes” can be edited to sound like you agreed to a purchase you never made or a service you never wanted.
The “yes” does something sneakier too. It confirms your number is real and picked up by a live human. Consumer watchdogs warn that in a world full of dead numbers and voicemail, a confirmed live line is worth money. It gets sold to other scammers, and you end up drowning in calls. Reports of this exact trick started climbing again back in mid-March 2024, and it never really stopped.
It doesn’t always begin with those exact words
“Is this the lady of the house?” works just as well. So does “Is this [your name]?” Anything that pulls a “yes” or a “this is she” out of your mouth gets the job done. A Minnesota man named Chris learned this over dinner. He answered, a voice asked “Can you hear me?”, he said “yes,” and then a recording announced he had won a free cruise. He hung up. Smart move, and his state’s consumer office agrees.
Here is a rule worth tattooing on your brain: it is not rude to hang up on a stranger mid-sentence. The longer you stay on the line, the more likely you are to get talked into something, and the more nuisance calls you invite down the road. You don’t owe a cold caller a goodbye.
Three seconds of your voice is all they need
Why does one little recording matter so much more than it used to? Because voice-cloning tools can now copy the way you sound from about three seconds of audio. A fraud expert at Experian put that number on the record, and it should rattle you. Three seconds is shorter than it takes to say your own phone number out loud.
They don’t even have to call you to grab it. A TikTok video, your voicemail greeting, a podcast clip, a few seconds of you laughing at a cookout someone posted online. All of it feeds the same machine. A familiar voice on the phone used to be built-in proof you were talking to someone you knew. That proof is falling apart, and fast.
The grandkid who never actually called
The cruelest version goes straight after grandparents. The phone rings and it’s your grandchild’s voice, crying, saying they were in an accident and begging you not to tell Mom. One common script has the grandparent hearing their actual grandkid say “Grandma, I’ve been in an accident,” then wiring bail money within the hour. These fake emergency calls often use a voice cloned from a video the kid posted last summer.
The average loss reported in these cases hovered around $11,000, usually paid in gift cards, cryptocurrency, or cash handed to a fake “bail bondsman.” In one real case out West, a mom picked up and heard her daughter sobbing. The number matched. The voice matched. The fear in the cry matched. None of it was real. The daughter was fine and had no idea a call was even happening.
Caller ID quit telling the truth
You might think, but my grandkid’s real number showed up, so it had to be them. Faking a caller ID number costs about three-tenths of a cent per call, and it works against every single US carrier. That is not a typo. For less than the loose change in your couch cushions, a scammer can make any name and number light up your screen: your bank, your daughter, the local sheriff’s office. Trusting caller ID today is like trusting a business card someone printed at home.
This is also why the calls often show a local area code. Scammers spoof numbers to look like a neighbor down the street, because you are far more likely to answer a call that seems close to home. Local-looking does not mean local. A lot of these calls are pinging your phone from the other side of the planet.
The numbers behind all this are ugly
Americans reported about $893 million lost to AI-related scams in a single year, spread across more than 22,000 complaints to the FBI. Investigators say that is only the tip of the iceberg, since most people are too embarrassed to admit they got fooled. Zoom out and total reported cybercrime losses for 2024 hit a record $16.6 billion. Imposter scams alone crossed a million reports.
Phone calls remain a top delivery method. The FTC ranked them the second most common way fraud reaches people, and one report found scammers are hardest to catch of all because they hide behind spoofed numbers and burner cells. One survey found that one in three people who actually engage with these AI calls end up losing money, with average losses topping $18,000. That’s a used car, gone in an afternoon phone call.
A fake boss on a video call cost one firm $25 million
Voice is only half the game now. In early 2024, a finance worker at the Hong Kong office of a big engineering company joined a video call with the firm’s chief financial officer and a handful of coworkers. Every face and every voice on that call was fake, generated by AI. He wired $25.6 million before anyone caught on. The whole crowd of “colleagues” was a computer program.
Security researchers say the old giveaways are dead. Broken English, blurry logos, robotic voices, those tells won’t save you anymore. You can no longer spot a scam by hunting for sloppiness. You spot it by changing how you verify who is actually on the other end of the line.
The moves that actually shut it down
Stop answering numbers you don’t recognize. If a call slips through and someone tosses you a “yes” question, answer with anything but yes. “I can hear you” or “this is she” both work, or just hang up without a single word. Never hand over personal or bank details to someone who called you first. And keep your voicemail greeting generic, first name only if you must, so no one can lift a clean audio sample from it.
Set up a family safe word. Pick a random word only your people know, then use it. If a panicked “relative” calls asking for money, ask them for the word. A real grandkid knows it. An AI clone doesn’t. Any call that cranks up urgency and demands money, gift cards, or a security code should get the same treatment every time: hang up and call the person back on a number you already have saved.
That last habit is the big one. One analysis found that roughly 90 percent of victims could have stopped the loss cold by simply hanging up and dialing back on a trusted number. AI can copy a face, a voice, and even a writing style, but it cannot answer a phone that you dial, and it cannot repeat a secret it never heard. Signing up for the National Do Not Call Registry helps with legit telemarketers, though it won’t stop the crooks, so leaning on call-blocking apps like Robokiller or Hiya adds another wall.
The next time your phone buzzes and a stranger’s very first words are “Can you hear me?”, you already know the honest answer. Say nothing. Put it down. The politest thing you can do for yourself is be a little rude to a robot.
