The archbishop of Mérida and Badajoz is asking for money from their parishioners by phone. The only problem is not doing it

Your phone rings, you pick up the call and turn out to be the archbishop of your community. He tells you as a voice that the Church needs donations for religious and social campaigns and you, confident Feligrés, with all the good intention of the world you make a donation because well, it is the archbishop who asks for it. The problem is that it is a lie. On the other side of the phone is not the archbishop, nor is the donation for social purposes. On the other side there is a scammer using a cloned voice through AI. And this, which could sound for science fiction, is not at all. It is just what happened in Mérida and Badajoz.

Context. The Archdiocese of Mérida-Badajoz has issued a statement on its website to notify a scam carried out through telephone calls. As detailed by the entity, the scammers were supplanting the voice of the archbishop of Mérida-Badajoz, Mr. José Rodríguez Carballo, to “deceive people requesting donations for religious and social campaigns.”

The Archdiocese has taken advantage of the statement to remember that “at no time the archbishop, or any member of the Diocesan curia, makes requests for economic aid by telephone, or through digital or telematic means.” He has also asked for the collaboration of parishioners to report and help stop the scam.

How is this possible? Cloning a voice is, even if it seems, something quite simple and relatively cheap. Simply have audio files with good quality and use a platform like Eleven Labs. For the modest price of five euros, anyone can clone a voice and generate about 30 minutes of audio. It is not the only option Not much less or there is no evidence that this tool has been used, but it is one of the most popular. And yes, you can also generate a conversational agent so that you can respond to the victim in real time with the cloned voice.

As for the audio files, a simple search on YouTube of the Name of the Archbishop returns us several clips of Mr. José Rodríguez Carballo speaking. There are long -lasting videos, some relatively recent, so it would be easy to obtain several audio hours with which to train AI.

A simple youtube search returns dozens of videos of Monsignor D. José Rodríguez Carballo speaking | Image: Xataka

The rest is public. Having this, the rest is to pull inventiveness. It would be enough to access the pastoral cards published by the archbishop to see how he writes and the news of the Archdiocese, to his biography on the Archbishopric website and some recent news, put everything in the cheatlele of Chatgpt, ask for a coherent speech, locute him with the voice stolen cloned and the rest is history. Fight against this? Complicated, at least.

It is not the first time. Just a few weeks ago the archbishopric of Seville He had to give his brotherhood alarm. The reason: an attempt to scam at the Andalusian level that used voices of some bishops to ask for money for Bizum. Something similar happened in Jaén In 2024. It is the Evolution of the Timo del CEOscam of which we have spent at least four years.

How to prevent? Distrustful. If an unknown telephone number calls us and a voice, however realistic, start asking us for money, personal data or anything that does not fit us or strange, it is best to hang and block the phone number. In the closest field, a good idea can be Implement a family password that we can use to demonstrate that we are, indeed, who claim to be.

Cover image | Archdiocese of Mérida-Badajoz

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