Good luck getting them to listen and take you seriously rather than engaging the standard ego defense of "I would never fall for that". And in general "don't g

Good luck getting them to listen and take you seriously rather than engaging the standard ego defense of "I would never fall for that". And in general "don't give out money or information to anyone calling on the phone" is good advice, but thinking it's a complete solution is a bit fanciful. I'll admit to personally finding myself on the receiving end of a call from $bank, and in a moment of weakness having supplied various bits of low-stakes personal information for their "verification". I had called them earlier and was expecting a response, but it could have just as easily been a scam calling at the perfect time. After the mental gears started turning and I realized how little I actually knew about the incoming call and how the requests were escalating, I stopped the conversation and asked where I could call them back. The point is it took a realization on my part, because these banks utilize highly deficient security procedures that make people comfortable with insecure behavior (starting with the use of effectively public information for "identity verification"), and the scammers only need a very tiny sliver of success rate to make it profitable. Also many of these scams are legitimate-business adjacent (medicare billing, medicare advantage, save money on electricity/tv, political campaigns, etc). Old people just want someone to talk to, effect their own fading agency, and really do believe the spiel of a friendly sounding person promising to help them. The potential damage there is lower than accounts being drained, but the continuum makes it hard to draw an absolute line when the "helpful" quasi-scammers blow right through it.