After a deepfake voice fooled her grandfather, this founder sprang into action
When the call came, Tarini Padmanabhuni’s grandfather believed he was talking to his brother. The voice on the other end of the line said he’d been kidnapped and that the only way to get him back was to pay a ransom. Her grandfather paid, only to learn later that his brother had been somewhere else entirely, with no clue any of it was happening.
- ▪When the call came, Tarini Padmanabhuni’s grandfather believed he was talking to his brother.
- ▪The voice on the other end of the line said he’d been kidnapped and that the only way to get him back was to pay a ransom.
- ▪Her grandfather paid, only to learn later that his brother had been somewhere else entirely, with no clue any of it was happening.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/after-a-deepfake-voice-fooled-her-grandfather-this-founder-sprang-into-action/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T15:27:23.499Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T15:27:23.499Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | V-yAgSa1fa9Q · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
When the call came, Tarini Padmanabhuni’s grandfather believed he was talking to his brother. The voice on the other end of the line said he’d been kidnapped and that the only way to get him back was to pay a ransom. Her grandfather paid, only to learn later that his brother had been somewhere else entirely, with no clue any of it was happening. The voice, it turned out, was a deepfake, an AI-generated imitation. “What stayed with me wasn’t the money,” Padmanabhuni says of the incident. “It was that he had no way of telling.” That was about two years ago. Today, she says, DetectifAI, the San Francisco-based company she founded, aims to ensure that others can’t be hoodwinked the same way. It’s a big and growing problem, with a market to match.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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