Your rabbi’s voice on the phone is not always your rabbi…
Criminals are using voice cloning and deepfake videos to impersonate Jewish leaders and solicit fraudulent donations from community members
- Incident date
- May 2024
- Target
- David Yosef
In May 2024, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate identified deepfake videos of Chief Rabbi David Yosef appearing to endorse a medical product he had never seen. This incident is part of a broader trend of sophisticated digital impersonation targeting Jewish institutions and individual donors.
What happened
Attackers are leveraging accessible AI tools to conduct high-fidelity social engineering campaigns. By utilizing as little as 30 seconds of audio harvested from public recordings, perpetrators can recreate the voices, cadence, and verbal habits of trusted figures. These cloned voices are then used to call congregants, creating a false sense of urgency regarding emergency situations to solicit gift cards or funds.
Beyond voice cloning, the threat includes the use of AI to generate personalized phishing emails and fabricated video content. The Secure Community Network documented 190 cyberattacks against Jewish organizations across 16 states between January and mid-April 2024, highlighting that these methods are not hypothetical. Security experts emphasize that smaller organizations are frequently targeted due to perceived vulnerabilities in their security infrastructure. To mitigate these risks, experts recommend abandoning the assumption that voice or video confirms identity, implementing multi-factor authentication, and conducting regular tabletop drills to train staff to verify sensitive requests through secondary, known communication channels.