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Stop the requested payment or disclosure immediately. Treat a convincing executive voice call as a suspected executive-impersonation and possible business-email-compromise incident, not as proof of identity. Verify the person through a phone number or secure channel already on file, preserve the original call and related records, contain any exposed accounts or devices, and contact financial institutions and law enforcement quickly if money or data may be at risk.
AI-generated voices can sound nearly identical to legitimate contacts, and caller ID can be spoofed. The FBI’s 2025 guidance says to use independent verification, multifactor authentication (MFA), and Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reporting. The safest response is a coordinated process that makes an urgent request wait for a second, trusted confirmation.
What to do in the first hour
- Stop the transaction or disclosure. Instruct the employee who received the call not to send money, gift cards, cryptocurrency, credentials, MFA codes, files, or new vendor information. Put a hold on any pending payment and alert treasury, security, legal, and the executive named in the request. Do not allow urgency, secrecy, or a familiar voice to bypass normal approval.
- Verify out of band. Call the executive, vendor, or colleague using a number already stored in the company directory or contract. Alternatively, use a pre-agreed secure messaging channel or an in-person confirmation. Do not use a number, link, meeting invite, or contact method supplied by the suspicious caller. The FBI recommends confirming newly supplied contact information through a previously verified platform or trusted source.
- Preserve the evidence. Save the original audio or voicemail, caller-ID information, originating number, date and time, text messages, email headers, URLs, payment instructions, meeting invitations, screenshots, and a factual timeline. Keep originals unchanged, make working copies for analysis, and restrict access to the incident team.
- Contain possible access. Review identity-provider, email, VPN, endpoint, payment, and cloud audit logs. Revoke active sessions and tokens, reset affected credentials, isolate suspicious endpoints, and remove access that is not needed. If the caller obtained a password, MFA code, recovery link, or file, escalate the event as a possible account compromise rather than only a phone scam.
- Call financial institutions. If funds moved or bank details changed, contact the originating bank and the receiving institution immediately through known fraud contacts. Ask about a recall, hold, or other recovery procedure and preserve the transaction record for investigators. FinCEN identifies executive-impersonation payment instructions as a known form of GenAI-enabled fraud.
- Report promptly. Make a report to local law enforcement and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3.gov). Consider a CISA report when the event is a significant cyber incident. Include the preserved timeline, payment information, phone numbers, messages, and technical logs.
Do not delete the voicemail, reset a device before collecting its relevant records, or continue communicating with the caller from an employee’s account. Those actions can destroy evidence or give an attacker more opportunities to manipulate the situation.
Why a familiar voice and caller ID are not authentication
Voice cloning can reproduce a person’s tone and speech patterns closely enough to fool someone who knows that person. The FBI said in 2025 that AI-generated content has advanced to the point that it is often difficult to identify. Caller ID is also not a reliable identity check because the displayed number can be manipulated.
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| Signal or control | What it can tell you | What it cannot prove |
|---|---|---|
| Familiar voice | The audio resembles a known person. | That the person is on the call or approved the request. |
| Caller ID | The number presented by the call system. | That the call originated from the legitimate owner of that number. |
| Voice or media detector | A technical signal that may support investigation. | That a payment or disclosure is safe; false positives and false negatives remain possible. |
| Independent callback | Confirmation through a previously trusted contact path. | That every other part of the request is legitimate; normal approval controls still apply. |
| Dual approval | A second authorized person reviews the request. | That either approver can rely on the original call without verification. |
Use an authentication decision, not a recognition decision: “Can we confirm this request through a channel the caller could not control?” A secret verification phrase agreed in advance can help, but it should supplement—not replace—an independent callback and payment controls.
How to preserve evidence that investigators can use
Keep originals intact
Export the voicemail or recording in its original format when possible. Do not trim silence, convert the file, add filters, or re-record it. Store a read-only original and calculate an internal hash if your incident process supports that. Make a separate copy for transcription or technical analysis.
Capture the surrounding records
- Call date, time zone, duration, displayed caller ID, originating number, and the employee who answered.
- Voicemail files, call-center records, messaging threads, email headers, meeting invitations, and attachments.
- Bank account numbers, beneficiary details, invoice numbers, cryptocurrency addresses, gift-card codes, or other payment instructions.
- Identity-provider, email, VPN, endpoint, cloud, payroll, and payment-system audit logs for the relevant period.
- A timeline written in plain factual language: what was requested, who acted, what was sent, and when each containment step occurred.
Restrict evidence access to the incident team and legal advisers who need it. The FTC advises organizations to analyze preserved data and logs and determine who had access. Preserve enough context to show whether a credential, MFA code, or file was exposed before you close the incident.
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Contain account, email, endpoint, and payment risk
If no information was disclosed
Keep the suspicious audio and messages, confirm that no payment or data left the company, and search logs for follow-up attempts. Warn the employee’s team that the caller may try a second channel, such as email, text, a collaboration platform, or a fake video meeting.
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If a password or MFA code was disclosed
Reset the affected password from a known-clean device, revoke active sessions and refresh tokens, and review recent sign-ins and mailbox rules. Remove unfamiliar forwarding rules, delegates, OAuth grants, recovery addresses, and newly registered devices. The FBI explicitly warns never to provide a two-factor code to anyone over email, SMS/MMS text, or an encrypted messaging application.
If a device or link may be compromised
Isolate the endpoint from the network without destroying volatile evidence, then involve your security team or incident-response provider. Review browser downloads, scripts, remote-access tools, and authentication events. Do not return the device to normal use until the team has determined whether credentials or tokens were collected.
If a payment was sent
Contact both banks immediately through numbers from your internal directory, a bank statement, or the contract—not a number in the message. Request a recall or hold, provide the transfer reference, and ask what evidence the bank needs. Preserve every bank communication and do not tell the scammer that a recall is underway.
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Reporting and legal duties
Send an IC3 report even when the attempted fraud failed; a pattern of phone numbers, accounts, or scripts can help investigators connect cases. Report to local law enforcement and consider CISA reporting for a significant cyber incident. Include facts, not a conclusion that the audio was synthetic unless qualified analysis supports that statement.
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If personal information, credentials, payroll data, customer records, or regulated files were exposed, involve counsel and your insurer. The FTC notes that all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have breach-notification laws for certain personal information. Requirements vary by the data involved, affected people, industry, contracts, and location. Counsel should assess state, federal, sector-specific, contractual, and insurance notification duties and coordinate timing with law enforcement.
What to tell employees, customers, and partners
Appoint one incident lead and one written approval path for external statements. Tell people what is confirmed, what remains under investigation, which requests are suspended, and where verified updates will appear. Give employees a practical instruction such as “pause and call the directory number” rather than merely warning them about AI.
Do not speculate about the attacker, identify an employee as responsible before facts are established, or claim that a recording is definitely artificial without evidence. The FTC advises against misleading statements and recommends a comprehensive plan covering employees, customers, investors, business partners, and other stakeholders. Coordinate notification timing with law enforcement when an investigation is active.
Controls to install after the incident
Make high-risk changes require two people
Require dual approval plus an out-of-band callback for wire transfers, vendor-bank changes, payroll changes, urgent purchases, and requests for credentials or MFA codes. The callback must use a contact path already recorded in the company’s directory or contract. A new number supplied in an urgent request is never the verification channel.
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Strengthen account authentication
Enable MFA on every account that supports it and prohibit sharing MFA codes. Put a FIDO2 security key on administrator, finance, and executive accounts where practical. A hardware key helps resist phishing and account takeover, but it does not prove that a caller’s voice is genuine; transaction verification remains necessary.
Train for cross-channel social engineering
Update awareness training to cover vishing, voice cloning, deepfake video meetings, fake invoices, and attacks that move from phone to email or text. Teach staff to recognize urgency, secrecy, a changed bank account, a request for a code, and pressure to skip a second approver. The FBI and an interagency deepfake notice describe these techniques as organizational threats.
Reduce exploitable public material
Where practical, reduce unnecessary public audio and video exposure for high-value employees. Maintain a trusted contact directory and a secret verification phrase for critical requests. This is risk reduction, not a guarantee: determined attackers may obtain enough public material to imitate a voice.
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Exercise the plan
Run a simulation using a fictional executive voice request and a payment hold. Measure whether the employee stops the transaction, whether the callback reaches a trusted number, how quickly logs and the original audio are preserved, and whether treasury, security, legal, and communications know their roles. Correct gaps while the exercise is fresh.
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What detection tools can—and cannot—do
The FTC groups available interventions into prevention and authentication, real-time detection, and post-use evaluation of existing audio. It also warns that there is no single solution to voice-cloning harms. Watermarks can be removed or distorted, detection methods evolve as models change, and false positives can be dangerous in financial or health settings.
Use a detector as an investigative signal: preserve the recording, compare it with known material, examine the call path and account activity, and seek independent confirmation. Never let a detector’s score be the sole approval decision for a payment, payroll change, credential reset, or disclosure. Avoid selecting a product based only on a claimed deepfake-detection percentage unless the provider supplies a current, independently reproducible evaluation.
Questions to settle before the next call
- Which two people can approve a wire transfer or vendor-bank change?
- Which directory or contract contains the trusted callback number?
- Where are original voicemails, email headers, transaction records, and audit logs stored?
- Who contacts the bank, law enforcement, IC3, CISA, counsel, and the insurer?
- Which channel carries verified employee and customer updates?
Write these answers into the incident plan and test them. A voice scam succeeds when urgency defeats process; a practiced pause, independent verification, and rapid evidence preservation turn the same call into a contained incident.
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