A 25-year-old South Carolina man is accused of using artificial intelligence voice-cloning software to pose as a woman for months, allegedly convincing a Georgia man he was in a real relationship and engaged to someone who never existed, according to a WBRC report.
Key Points
- Caleb Mills, 25, has been charged in connection with the alleged scheme, according to WBRC.
- Investigators say Mills built a fake identity called “Hailey Morello” using stolen photos of a real sheriff’s deputy from Florida.
- The alleged victim, a man from Athens, Georgia, believed he was dating and eventually got engaged to “Hailey” over several months.
- Mills allegedly used AI voice-changing technology during phone calls so his voice sounded like a woman’s, rather than communicating only through text.
- The case has also drawn coverage from a separate Georgia news outlet tracking the investigation.
Traditional catfishing schemes typically rely on little more than a stolen profile picture and a willingness to lie in a text thread. This case allegedly went further. According to the WBRC report, Mills used voice-altering technology to speak directly with his alleged victim by phone, adding an audio layer that made the fabricated persona harder to question.
The stolen images reportedly belonged to an actual Florida sheriff’s deputy, meaning a real person’s likeness was allegedly used without her knowledge to anchor the fictitious “Hailey Morello” identity. Pairing a genuine photo with a synthetic voice let the alleged scheme extend well past a typical online-only relationship, investigators say, into what the victim understood to be a phone relationship building toward marriage.
The relationship allegedly lasted months before unraveling, with the Athens man reportedly believing he was engaged to a woman who does not exist. Local investigators pursued charges after the alleged scheme came to light, per the WBRC report.
Voice-cloning tools have grown far more accessible in recent years, letting scammers generate convincing synthetic audio from short samples of real speech. Cases that pair that technology with stolen photographs, as investigators allege happened here, mark a shift from simple text-based catfishing toward a more elaborate, multi-sensory form of deception.
The charges against Mills come as police departments nationwide report a steady rise in romance-fraud cases involving digitally altered images and audio. For victims, the added realism of a cloned voice can make it far harder to spot the warning signs that once made stolen-photo catfishing easier to catch.
Investigators have not detailed how the alleged relationship ultimately fell apart or how the victim in Athens discovered that “Hailey Morello” was not a real person. What is clear from the WBRC report is that a phone-based deception sustained over months proved harder to unravel than a typical text-only scam, largely because the added voice component gave the fabricated identity a sense of consistency that photos alone could not provide.
