His daughter called him crying, and then another voice got on the phone. Only one of them was real

May 8-Mark A. Young's daughter called him at his home on a Monday. The young woman's panicked voice projected fear and pain.

She needed her father.

"She was crying and upset," Young said. "She told me, 'Dad, I got in an accident and I'm in trouble. I need help.' "

Knowing she had traveled from Spokane to Seattle for a concert, the tone of the familiar voice sparked an immediate defensive reaction from Young, who spent most of his career responding to danger.

A male voice then got on the phone, said he was a medic and told Young, a retired police officer, that his 24-year-old daughter had been involved in a collision.

And then a second male voice took over the conversation. That voice continues to haunt Young.

That man, who had a Scottish accent, asked questions of Young to confirm he was the driver's father.

"Then his tone changed," Young said. "He first identified himself as a drug dealer."

The man, who never gave his name, explained to Young that his daughter had been involved in a collision that had interrupted a drug transaction. She had seen "something she wasn't supposed to see."

"He told me because of that, he had taken my daughter as a hostage and he was deciding what to do with her," Young said. "He said he could kill her, make her a prostitute or sell her overseas to sex traders."

During the conversation, the voice several times allowed Young to speak with his daughter, who out of a request from the family, The Spokesman-Review agreed not to identify.

"There is nothing like a loved one suffering over the phone and there is nothing you can do," Young said. "I thought I was a pretty tough guy. But that almost broke me."

But the voice wasn't that of his daughter. It was a fake, an AI-generated copy.

The perpetrators, investigators later surmised, used a recording of the daughter's voice and a program that so accurately mimicked her speech pattern that it convinced Young to leave his home in the small Whitman County town of Garfield to visit several banks and drive all over the Palouse and Idaho to get money to save her life.

The Federal Trade Commission began warning consumers as early as 2023 of the new type of scam that uses AI to copy the voices of family members.

"Scammers ask you to pay or send money in ways that make it hard to get your money back. If the caller says to wire money, send cryptocurrency, or buy gift cards and give them the card numbers and PINs, those could be signs of a scam," according to the FTC news release.

In Young's case, he wired $13,000 and was in the process of getting thousands more when the 30-hour ordeal finally ended inside of a Pullman bank branch.

The calm demeanor of a longtime banker, and quick response by Pullman Police, finally led to Young's daughter being reached to make sure she was safe and at home in Spokane.

"I almost collapsed," said Young, who cried at learning the truth. "I was just so relieved. It took me days to literally start feeling normal again."

The intensity of the ordeal, he said, cannot be understated, even for a man who worked 26 years as a police officer in Santa Rosa, California, and volunteered to serve as a Marine in Vietnam where he was shot in the arm.

"You are living every minute like it's your last," Young said of the AI extortion. "You are trying to figure out what you can do. That's a hard feeling for me to grasp, because I've never felt helpless like that."

Chasing the fear

The call came Monday, March 23.

After the initial conversations that convinced Young that his daughter was in danger, he began complying with the demands from the man with the Scottish accent.

The man explained to Young that he first needed to transfer money to cover the thousands lost in the drug transaction that his daughter had interrupted.

Young, who worked six years as a journalist before becoming a police officer and also has authored six books, said he focused his entire energy on helping his daughter.

"I had no doubts that I had spoken to my daughter, and I assumed that she was in his custody," he said. "I did whatever I could to cooperate for the next 30 hours."

The voice ordered Young to maintain the telephone call, which prevented him from calling for help or his wife.

"He said, 'If I lose you, I'm going to take it out on your daughter.' My training as a cop for 26 years, and being in the Marines, I knew how to keep my emotions under control and handle myself as a dutiful victim," Young said. "But it wasn't easy.

"I just played along with him, and he directed me to go to one of two banks that we have."

Young first drove to a branch in Garfield and withdrew $5,000. The caller directed him to drive to a Walmart in Pullman where he had Young transfer half the money to someone in Mexico. The caller directed Young to do the same thing at a Walmart in Moscow.

He then traveled to the WaFd (formerly known as Washington Federal) Bank branch in Pullman, where he took another $5,000, and drove to Lewiston to transfer the same $2,500 amounts from two different stores there.

"I'm on the phone with him the whole time. When I'm traveling, I have to list off all the mile markers on the road so he knows where I'm at," said Young, who could tell the man on the other line was real, unlike the voice mimicking his daughter. "He let me talk to my daughter a couple more times. In the meantime ... he's trying to get more information from me."

The caller asked whether Young, 75, had retired and what he did for his career. Fearing that his daughter had already told the abductor about his past, Young said he told the truth to protect her.

The caller then directed Young to travel to Boise, because he said he feared that local law enforcement may be trying to monitor the situation.

Young complied, drove hours south and got a hotel room in Boise. Once there, he snuck out of his room, raced down to the hotel lobby and used the hotel phone to call his wife.

Katie Young was in Chicago on business. When Mark Young called, her phone was off and the call went to voicemail. But his wife's voicemail was full, so he was not able to leave a message.

"That was a bummer," Young said.

He got back to his room just as the voice called Young's cell phone to check on him.

The next day, Young transferred another $2,500 from a store in Boise. But when he tried it again, he learned that his ATM card had been blocked.

He told the voice that he could solve the ATM problem by driving back to his bank branch in Pullman.

On the drive back north, Young passed several places where he lost cell phone coverage in the Idaho mountains.

During one of those periods, he pulled over and wrote down his wife's phone number and explained his situation on a piece of paper so that the FBI could later tell his wife what was happening in case the situation worsened.

He finally made it back to Pullman the afternoon of Tuesday, March 24.

"He led me to believe that he was doing surveillance on me while I went to the bank," Young said.

Young walk ed into the branch, located at 405 E. Main St. in Pullman, and saw someone familiar - Alex Navarro, the assistant branch manager.

Young handed Navarro a note, pointed at it and walked into the bank's bathroom.

Adventures in banking

Navarro said he took the note and immediately thought something else was happening.

Young "walked in with a purpose. He had this note. I knew something was wrong when he set it down and pointed at it," Navarro said. "The first thing that popped in my mind was, 'This guy is robbing me.' Then he went to the bathroom. I thought, that's weird.

"Then I read the note. I was not expecting that."

Young said he fully intended to withdraw $17,000, which is what the voice said it would take to buy his daughter's freedom.

Sensing the danger and realizing through Young's gestures that the perpetrator was listening in by telephone, Navarro began calmly explaining the process to get the money.

Navarro then told Young that he had to make a phone call to the ATM company to release his card.

"I was just buying time," Navarro said. "I made a phone call to our card department and was talking on the phone. But actually, I was texting the teammates that I have a very serious situation going on and I need someone in the back room."

Navarro came up with another excuse, saying that he had to go in the back to retrieve cash. He used the ruse to meet with a longtime teller.

"I told her, 'We have a possible extortion kidnapping.' " She went to another part of the building and called Pullman Police, located a block away.

In the meantime, Young passed another note asking Navarro whether he was going to get his money.

Navarro told him no and indicated that police had been alerted.

"He was truly panicked," Navarro said. "He was grabbing his forehead. His physical distress was clear. He wrote back in another note, 'They are watching us. They said they are outside the building watching us.' "

But Navarro needed to stall for time to allow police to arrive. He solved it with the slow count.

"I told him, 'I have to count back the $17,000 to you.' So, we went through a fake transaction," he said.

With the voice listening, Navarro made a big show of counting out the money in $100 increments. Because the money didn't exist, Navarro pantomimed placing papers down on the desk to sound like he was stacking cash.

Halfway through his counting delay tactic, Officer Shane Emerson entered the branch. Navarro and Young took pains to let the officer know that the perpetrator was listening, and they also passed Emerson a note warning that others could be watching the bank.

Emerson, according to his police report, called for backup officers to respond to search the branch's parking areas and other location to see if they could locate conspirators.

He then took Young's note, the one with his wife's phone number written on it, and left the bank before calling Katie Young.

"I advised her what was going on, and she said she was on the phone with (her daughter). She merged the calls," Emerson wrote. The daughter "said she was at her residence in Spokane and was absolutely safe."

Emerson returned to the branch to alert Mark Young that his family was safe. "Young was shocked and started to cry," Emerson wrote.

"I didn't realize how much I was holding in until I learned my daughter was fine," Young said.

Young said he later sent both Emerson and Navarro notes thanking them for how they handled and diffused what he was convinced was a life-or-death situation.

Navarro said he's seen a lot during 35 years of banking, but nothing compared to that afternoon.

"This is the first time I have ever heard somebody being involved with something like this," Navarro said, "where an AI-generated voice has mimicked a person's voice and they weren't able to tell the difference."

The aftermath

Young followed up with Pullman police and later traveled to Spokane to speak with FBI investigators, but as of yet, has not been able to recover any of the funds he wired from the multiple stores.

Katie Young said it's taken her husband a long time to recover from the ordeal. She said she was in the lobby of the hotel in Chicago when Officer Emerson called her.

"You never really want to get a call, when you are out of town, from the police department. It's never really good news," she said. "I was instantly at attention."

After merging the calls to let Emerson know that her daughter was safe, Katie Young flew to Spokane and drove to Garfield.

"I was home the next day. My daughter drove over," she said. "We were all together and happy."

She stressed that she doesn't believe her family was a victim of a scam.

"This is really extortion. It's a very different thing," she said. "And it's unconscionable. I can't imagine how anyone could possibly do that."

They still don't know how those extortionists knew their daughter's voice.

Both Katie and Mark Young implored parents to work with family members to come up with a safe word only they would know, to utter in emergencies like this. It's about the only defense they could imagine in a similar scenario.

"They can fabricate it so well now," Mark Young said of his daughter's voice. "I could not tell it wasn't her. To me, it was her voice. I was trying to calm her down while trying to calm this guy down."

He noted that throughout the 30-hour ordeal, the man with the Scottish accent called back dozens of times. Many of those calls came from different phone numbers that had area codes from Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

After the rush of emotion on learning his daughter was safe, Mark Young left the Pullman branch.

When he got to his car, the voice called back one last time.

"The bad guy comes on the phone and said, 'You got my money?' I told him, 'No. I know my daughter is fine,' " Young said. "I told him several choice words that I can't repeat."

The voice claimed that he had guns and could kill everyone Young loves.

"I told him, 'I pray you come looking for me,' and I told him what I would do," Young said.

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