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It's all good until they don't realize the thing that is happening is something they should call about. You'll sit down to talk to your parents someday and the
by dpcan 7y ago
It's all good until they don't realize the thing that is happening is something they should call about.
You'll sit down to talk to your parents someday and the damage will already be done.
The scammers are fast. They are good. They are like vultures hovering over the elderly. Our parents don't see this stuff coming, and they comply too quickly.
My wife administers a nursing home and this is a daily problem. Their residents get calls from scammers constantly and they have to stop little old men and women from walking out of the building to catch a bus to go to the bank to send money to one scammer after another.
They are always telling them, no, the medicare office does not want you to put all your money in a government bank account for them to make deposits to - those are scammer accounts. No, a nephew you never heard about does NOT need to be bailed out of jail. No, you do not have to buy a pre-paid visa card over the phone in order to pay for medications. No, you never have to purchase a coupon for $50 that will save you $100 at the store, those don't exist. It goes on and on and on and on.
- ghostpepper 7y agoYeah this doesn't really sound like a strategy for preventing them from getting scammed
- thrownaway954 7y agoYou can't prevent everything :( a lot of the situations you described are targeted at people with dementia and other neurological disorders. there really isn't anything you can do in those cases. thankfully my parent have their wits and don't suffer from such disorders.
- aswanson 7y agoIt can also happen quickly with isolated parents if they're at a transition point (still living home) and a scammer walks in. I had a friend who's father was starting to suffer from dementia and had a woman who got control of some of his bank account info and was emptying him out. After my friend had his dad hospitalized, she was calling the hospital trying to get access to him and he had to get his room changed to an alias. Hospitals have frighteningly poor security measures.
- SkyBelow 7y agoWhen I visit relatives in the hospital there is no one stopping/verifying/questioning me. At all. No checks, no questions, nothing. If you act like you know where you are going no one worries enough to stop you. It has left me feeling concerned each time, especially when it is a younger relative in the hospital.
- tialaramex 7y agoDefinitely. But it may be enough depending on your parents, I think for now it's enough for my mother for example. And the title question is "How do you protect your parents?" not "How, hypothetically, should everybody's parents be protected?" My mother phoned me because her laptop was yelling at her. Bad guys had taken over her browser (IE maybe? Or Edge? I genuinely don't remember) and on start-up it was repeating a verbal message on maximum volume about how they now controlled her computer and she needed to call them to... well you know how these go. But she had the sense to realise that even though it said she must call _them_ she could rather call _me_ and since it was yelling at her she put the laptop down and left it yelling into thin air. I walked her through the surprisingly easy process to disable it and get her back in her comfort zone. I explained what they'd tried to achieve, that they had tried to trick her into thinking they were more powerful than they really were - and praised her for taking the time to call me.
- dr_orpheus 7y agoScammers can definitely be fast. My grandfather was scammed recently. He got a phone call claiming to be some sort of technical support for the retirement community he was living in. Eventually he figured out he was being scammed, hung up, and called me. Unfortunately, because it had happened so quickly he didn't remember everything the scammer had asked him to do. So it took quite a bit of searching until we figured it out.