Voice Biometrics Goes Back to Jail

In an earlier posting, I described the use of voice biometrics in jails/prisons to prevent illegal activity by inmates. An article in today’s Mt. Vernon Register-News reinforces the need for voice biometrics to prevent inmates from perpetrating phone scams.

According to the item, inmates at the Jefferson County Detention Center (Illinois) are using pay phones to call unsuspecting citizens and scam them. “This time, they are using a little different technique,” Jefferson County Sheriff Mulch explained. “The caller uses a calling card that has the ability to program it to Spanish. The person receiving the call only understands the ‘Jefferson County Detention Center,’ portion, and they hit the prompt to speak with the person. They get the detainee, who then speaks in English.”

The detainee pretends to be a police officer who is trying to identify someone who has been involved in a traffic accident, and the phone number they called was on the victim’s cell phone.

“People want to help and ask what they need,” Mulch said. “They are told to dial star 72 and enter a series of eight numbers, or they tell them to dial 1172 and a series of numbers. What that does is locks the phone number in and they can then use a calling card to make calls across the country using the victim’s phone number.”

Sheriff Mulch is in the process of researching the use of voice biometrics to track inmates’ fraudulent calls.