Common sense or not, here’s why no one should prank the United States Coast Guard. Ready?

ONE: It puts brave service members’ lives at risk for no reason.

TWO: It wastes precious assets, thus ballooning Americans’ taxes.

THREE:Brand-new technology is enabling the USCG to nab each and every individual who does it.

FOUR: Prison isn’t fun?

Per #3, it’s all about voice recognition.

This via The Verge:

Historically, voice recognition has often been overlooked as a biometric in favor of fingerprinting and facial recognition, leaving lots of research but few off-the-shelf solutions for the Coast Guard to use. Automated voice recognition systems have more often focused on translating speech to text, from early experiments at Bell Labs and DARPA through modern projects like Siri and Cortana. Identification of voices, meanwhile, has historically been done by humans. Forensic analysts at the FBI and US intelligence agencies can study audio recordings for clues, determining how old a speaker is or the kind of room they’re calling from. But distinguishing one voice from another is a more subtle art, and researchers are only recently learning how to automate it.

Some of that technology is already in place at large call centers, which use it to fend off fraud. A company called Nuance — which currently operates voice biometric systems for Barclays, HSBC and others — can build a voice print from only 40 seconds of speech. Within government, Citizenship and Immigration Services is looking for a similar technology to employ in its own call centers, as a way of verifying callers’ identities. Similar algorithms have also found their way into consumer devices: Last week, Google unveiled a similar function for Google Home, allowing the device to identify who’s speaking based on a locally stored voiceprint. At the same time, researchers have also developed advanced voice-spoofing software, allowing sophisticated hoaxers speak with someone else’s voice.

Soon, these troublemakers will face the painful consequences of their frivolous, fake pleas.