Scammers are teaching AI to sound like you, and research says our brains are falling for it– www.digitaltrends.com

The next scam call you receive may not sound like a robot, a call center, or even someone pretending to be your relative. AI voice generators have become capable of reproducing regional accents and dialects that sound convincing enough that researchers are warning they could become a potent social-engineering tool.

For example, a scammer could use an accent familiar to a targeted community to make a suspicious call sound considerably more trustworthy.

Research from Abertay University examined synthetic versions of Scottish Standard English and Dundonian Scots, a regional dialect spoken around Dundee. The study found people frequently assumed AI-generated speech was human, with that bias becoming even more concerning when regional dialects come into the conversation, which isn’t something people expect a machine to reproduce.

Another 2026 study, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, points to why that matters for scams. Researchers analyzed 7,002 entrepreneur-investor combinations from Shark Tank, 2,091 Kickstarter campaigns, and several laboratory experiments.