AI Voice, Stolen Context, and Why RMail’s Impersonation Detection Matters More Than Ever

Impersonations Strike the NFL, a Pranky Style.

Armand here, RPost’s product evangelist armadillo. With the stock market frenzy, tariff talks and AI stock-hype-cycle, I’ve been wearing my macroeconomic hat lately. But I realized, after meeting with some of our RPost partners in Japan, some of our readers prefer my sporty side – for our Japanese partners in particular, my ramblings about Ohtani-san (one of the greatest baseball players ever, and certainly from Japan) and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

One thing struck me with regards to the National Football League (NFL) draft.

Impersonations. AI is powering up cybercriminals with their ability to impersonate using face and voice replication off-the-shelf technologies. And, my human friends are very susceptible to being lured into (and quite often, according to the US Secret Service, every 37 seconds) mis-sending money that ends up in cybercriminal bank accounts. We’ve explained how they are doing this --- you can read a recent article for more here.

My point with regards to the NFL draft is we learned that WITH CONTEXT (meaning information about who should be communicating with whom about what when), impersonation schemes can become quite convincing and powerful. Without context, they will fall flat.

Context is King (for kids of NFL coaches and for cybercriminals 😉). 

And, context can be gleaned by compromising email accounts, eavesdropping on email, or simply by conducting research and positioning oneself in the mind of the person being lured/tricked. More on this related to the NFL shortly after a quick comment on the NFL draft as a backgrounder.

With the NFL draft coming to an end, there have been some very surprising draft choices. The NFL Draft is one of the best ways to completely change how a football team looks. It is meant to not only pick the best player available, but to also address the team's needs. That is exactly what the New England Patriots did in this draft.

Being just outside the top three in the draft, they started off picking fourth overall where they selected Will Campbell, the best offensive lineman in the draft (an opinion of my armadillo peers). The NE Patriots entire draft was just about perfect with the players they brought in, addressing the current team’s weaknesses in offensive line, running back, and wide receiver, while bringing in some much-needed depth in other areas.

In my humble armadillo opinion, the New England Patriots had the best draft out of any of the other teams. The NFL should be scared with what the Patriots have created this past offseason and what they are building for the future. They could be back on top sooner than everyone expects.😊

The most surprising story of the draft was none other than Shedeur Sanders. For the past year he had been a projected first round pick, but more importantly, a top three pick in this draft. This was expected until about a week before the draft started when all of a sudden, reports came out that he might fall to the late first round. There were still no signs of him dropping out of the first round. So, when I saw that he wasn’t drafted in the first round, I was shocked. I immediately thought he would be taken in the beginning of the second day, which was rounds 2 and 3. 

Shedeur Sanders himself thought this was the case after receiving a call on a special draft phone, with the phone number only known to NFL executives. Obviously, he answered the phone thinking he was going to be drafted. But that was not the case. Someone called him impersonating a General Manager for an NFL team to exclaim that Sanders was picked for their team (a massively important telephone call, likely the most important of his life to date). As the story unfolded, it came as a shock that someone would conduct this type of impersonation. It was even more startling when reports came out that the son of an Atlanta Falcons coach was the one who had impersonated a coach and called Shedeur Sanders to deliver the fake news of being selected for a fake team. 

This son of the Falcons coach had context – he knew the voice of the General Manager being impersonated, knew the context of the draft, knew the special number to call and precisely when to call, and knew what to say. This context powered up this voice-telephone impersonation scheme.

For Shedeur Sanders, this impersonation was a prank and had no financial impact. 

You may not be so lucky. Impersonations targeting YOU may be more targeted and successful at luring money from you. 

The good news for YOU? You have RMail to help you identify leaks of your information that can give impersonators context; and then the RPost technology can (using AI) un-leak these leaks automatically and protect you.

The good news for Shedeur Sanders -- his worries of being drafted came to an end when he was finally selected in the 5th round by the Cleveland Browns, who I thought also had a very strong draft. I believe Shedeur Sanders has the potential to being the Browns week 1 starter if he can use his draft spot and the prank call as motivation to beat out his competition. Stay tuned for more sporty Armand insights.

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