A dispatcher with Anne Arundel County Fire Department answers a 911 emergency call from their department dispatch center in Glen Burnie, Md., in 2020. 911 dispatchers have long dealt with swatting calls, where callers report a bomb threat, mass shooting or some other kind of life-threatening emergency with the intention of initiating a massive emergency response. Now, AI-generated voice calls are posing a new challenge.
Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images
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Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images
In August, a caller made a bomb threat to Wheatland Union High School in Yuba County, Calif.
Police responded overnight and classes were canceled. There was no bomb and no one was hurt.
Authorities said it was part of a series of hoax calls — also called swatting — made to schools across the country over the summer.
Swatting calls can be made to 911 or police departments, with callers reporting a bomb threat, mass shooting or some other kind of life-threatening emergency with the intention of initiating a massive emergency response, according to the FBI.
911 dispatchers have long dealt with this problem. But the incident in Yuba County was different: The call was made by an AI-generated voice, a new and growing challenge for emergency responders.
“Those voices [of swatting callers] used to be pretty easy to recognize, but now they’re natural sounding. They can insert pauses. They can use words like, ‘uh’, or ‘maybe, um, let me think about it.’ And it sounds very natural,” says Mel Maier, the CEO and executive director of APCO International, the Association of Public Safety Communication Officials.
The goal of swatting calls is to harass or retaliate against the targets of the calls — like a public official. They usually trigger a big, chaotic response from police, redirecting public safety resources from real emergencies.
People also have been killed and injured in swatting attacks, Maier notes.
Swatting calls made by people using AI-generated voices or background sounds are making these hoax calls sound even more realistic, and harder to determine what’s real and what isn’t.
APCO and NENA: The 9-1-1 Association, which both represent 911 dispatchers, say incidents like the one in Yuba County reflect their growing worries over how AI could be used by bad actors.
APCO and the Public Safety Threat Alliance, an information-sharing and cybersecurity group, looked into the prevalence of swatting to 911 call centers. They published their findings in June based on 766 responses from public safety communications professionals. About 14% of dispatchers said they were targeted using AI tools. Maier says he thinks that number is going to keep going up with increasingly advanced tools
Signs of a swatting call
Companies like ElevenLabs, an artificial intelligence company creating synthetic voice software, offer AI tools that are incredibly cheap and readily available, according to Brandon May, an assistant professor of forensic psychology at the Florida Institute of Technology.
“I’m able to clone my voice on ElevenLabs for less than $20, and I can change the intonations. I can change how deep or high-pitch my voice is. I can change the pauses,” he says.
And this makes it hard for anyone to detect these AI fakes.
“It is no longer simple to just look at an image or hear a video or hear a voice and go, ‘That is AI.’ People are duped by this all the time,” he says.
Elaborate fraud callers using AI chatbots are even tricking people into handing over their life savings, May says.
And the increasing sophistication of these fake voices and sound effects makes it especially difficult for emergency dispatchers to deduce what is real or not during what May calls “high-stakes, high-consequence” calls. “It is going to be nearly impossible to detect,” he says.
Despite the difficulty, APCO and NENA are developing ways to train their members to deal with these new threats.
April Heinze, NENA’s vice president and chief of 911 operations, says there are some hallmarks of a swatting call.
For example, most swatters do not dial 911 directly.
“The reason being is 911 provides location. It provides a callback number. It provides the name of the person who owns the phone. It provides a lot of extra data, and it’s really impossible to spoof your location on 911,” she says.
Swatting calls are usually made to police departments or courthouses, Heinze explains. These callers are then ultimately transferred into the 911 centers. So trying to trace those calls is impossible, she says.
Training evolves to address new AI threat
Both Heinze and Maier decline to describe the specifics of training to identify potential AI swatting calls. The more information available, they say, the easier it will be to train AI to fool dispatchers going forward.
Maier does note one idea for training. APCO is working to create training criteria on caller interrogations where the dispatcher asks the caller specific questions at “such granular level that an AI cannot scoop that information from a public database, cannot capture it from a social media post, or simply make guesses,” he says.
Despite the growing concerns about the use of AI, both Maier and Heinze emphasize that dispatchers will always assume calls reporting a life-threatening situation are real — and will continue sending emergency resources to any call for help.
“It’s important to understand that no matter what, public safety is going to have a very strong response,” Heinze says. “Even if there are indicators that it is a swatting incident. They are always reporting a life-or-death situation, and if it’s a life-or-death situation, you cannot ever take chances on that.”
