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> It’s hard to understand how someone could fall for this scam… if a loved one was having an emergency of some kind I would expect them to call rather than text
by randycupertino 2y ago
> It’s hard to understand how someone could fall for this scam… if a loved one was having an emergency of some kind I would expect them to call rather than text, and I would respond with a call either way to discuss the details.
I think elderly are more vulnerable to this, because they get scared and want to help.
My elderly mother fell victim to a "microsoft" and "paypal" technician calling her twice, despite my training her on how not to pick up the phone from these calls and going over how nobody from these companies would ever call her. She got nervous and scared and basically did whatever the scammers told her because she thought something was wrong with her computer.
Now after it's happened twice :she has been reminded not to answer any calls from number she doesn't know. But she still gets nervous she is going to miss something important from health insurance or doctors office so she is still tempted to pick up spam calls.
It's tough, no matter how much I train her she will still want to answer and "help" the scammer. They keep doing this because it works.
I need to just lock her phone down so all callers not in her contact list go to a voicemail I screen. :-/
- guestbest 2y agoYou need to be her call screener
- prawn 2y agoA friend's mother fell for one of these largely because she'd contacted her ISP earlier that day about a problem and was expecting a call back. Very unfortunate.
- franciscop 2y agoPart of my family training has been "phone numbers can be easily stolen" so be wary of that (okay we know it's not "easy", but they CAN be stolen by a semi-decent cracker calling the ISP and this sentence has already 2 words that would take days to explain to them).
- zlefgram 2y agoThere are collaborative filtering apps that come as a replacement for your phone's native phone app. Works well. Next level approach would be to plug in a LLM with voice synthesis and make the scammers waste time and money.