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New Hampshire Attorney General Announced in a press release The state announced Thursday that it had charged Steve Kramer with 26 crimes. These include 13 felony counts of voter obstruction and 13 misdemeanor counts of impersonating a candidate. Each charge pertains to 13 voters who received calls, but they were not the only ones in the state to receive calls.
Ahead of January’s New Hampshire primary, thousands of voters in the state reported receiving robocalls featuring an AI-generated voice of Joe Biden, telling them to stay home and vote. . NBC News first reported.
The attorney general alleges that Cramer engaged in felony voter suppression by “sending or procuring the sending of prerecorded messages disguised as the source of telephone calls, deceptively using artificially generated voices of candidates, and providing misleading information to discourage voters.”
Cramer was working for Dean Phillips, then a Minnesota congressman and presidential candidate. told NBC News In February, he was revealed to be the mastermind behind the plot. A New Orleans-based magician and world record holder in fork-bending also admitted to the outlet that Kramer hired him to generate the audio of Biden but had no idea it would be distributed. He has not been charged in connection with that incident.
A spokesperson for Phillips previously told Business Insider that the Phillips campaign did not ask Cramer to create the fake Biden robocall and was “disgusted” by the call and Cramer’s alleged involvement. He said that he is doing so.
In another announcement Thursday, Federal Communications Commission Proposal Kramer will be fined $6 million for making “clearly illegal robocalls that used deepfakes, AI-generated voice cloning technology, and caller ID spoofing to spread election misinformation.”
“We are pleased that our federal partners are similarly committed to protecting consumers and voters from harmful robocalls and voter suppression,” New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said in a statement about the FCC’s announcement. “We hope that our respective enforcement actions will send a strong deterrent signal to those who may consider interfering with our elections, whether through the use of artificial intelligence or otherwise.”
Neither Mr. Kramer nor his representatives immediately responded to requests for comment on the charges.
“For an investment of just $500, anyone could replicate my targeted outreach,” Cramer previously told Business Insider, adding that finding voters to contact was easy: “Voter lists can be purchased quickly and easily through political vendors,” he said.
Robocall scam experts also previously said the New Hampshire incident was the “tip of the iceberg” and that we should expect more in the dangerous new era of political spam calls, Business Insider previously said. was warning.