4 ms·

While he was still living on his own, my grandfather struggled with people sending him scam letters in the mail. He sent a meaningful amount of money to obvious

• userbinator 2mo ago
  Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift? "Ignore anyone asking you for money unless you know them and they do it in-person."
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo ago
    That is completely impractical for most people.
    • tty456 2mo ago
      Why?
    • BLKNSLVR 2mo ago
      Say what?! It sounds extremely obvious and infinitely practical. How often are you (or your parents) legitimately asked for money via email / internet? I mean, my answer is: never. My parents' answer is: never. My parents-in-law answer is: never.
      • infamouscow 2mo ago
        The scam is usually a phone call from a loved one in jail or the hospital. It immediately creates a sense of panic and fully explains the random phone number. The voice doesn't have to sound like you either.
        • userbinator 2mo ago
          This is where "security questions" can be useful; neither the question nor answer need to be real, and the more outrageous the better. "You're my daughter? Then tell me the name of your twelth pet centipede."
          • dosisking 2mo ago
            I use "Queen to queen's level 3" and then wait for the appropriate response.
            • teddyh 2mo ago
              The answer is easily found by Google, and any AI could give the correct answer instantly.
              • lesostep 2mo ago
                And that's why you teach your elders the wrong answer for a right question! :D
          • zbentley 2mo ago
            For voice scams this is critical. I set up duress codes with all of my non technical and elderly family and close friends last year. It should be a simple, pink-elephant-type nonsense question and answer that you rehearse a few times in person and make sure they never share with others. “Q: What’s your favorite leprechaun? A: Rutabaga” or something. Even cognitively impaired folks can, with a few rehearsals over a day or so, retain that easily, I’ve found. Reminding them to practice it when people reach out pretending to be me takes a bit more rehearsal, but I’ve found that it sticks reliably even then.
        • sophacles 2mo ago
          That's not "usually" the scam. It's a scam, but it's not the most common.
      • normie3000 2mo ago
        Great if that works for you. Asking for money is common over voice or whatsapp in some countries for things like medical care, funerals, weddings, police "fines", school fees etc.
        • BLKNSLVR 2mo ago
          Yeah, fair point, it's pretty well outside normal for me (there's a world outside of my lived experience? Nah!)
          • seanmcdirmid 2mo ago
            The scams have to be culturally relevant to be effective, which is why they set out wide bets looking to see what sticks with a fairly small target audience.
        • otikik 2mo ago
          Wow. Well those people are going to be scammed. A LOT
          • normie3000 2mo ago
            Yeah they do. Now add mobile money to the equation.
        • close04 2mo ago
          An addendum is don't give money when you're called by a "legitimate contact", call them back first. The scammer is remote so they can pretend to be the "legitimate contact" but not so easy to block the real legitimate contact from being contacted for validation.
  • mrheosuper 2mo ago
    Easier said than done. One of most popular scam here is a scammer using deepfake/ai calling victim saying there was serious accident to one of victim's relative and they need money for hospital (that's how it works here, money for proper caring). The victim would be panic and send the money. Usually, the scammer will think of a scenario that give the victim very limited time to stop and think, or put them in the state that fear takes over their mind
    • awesomeusername 2mo ago
      You just gave me an idea... Let's all pitch in and spread the cost of health care around. Average it out so no one gets left behind.
      • alibarber 2mo ago
        In places where we have that the scam is just money for transport, utilities, or whatever. Something has happened which means they cannot access their money and make the usual payment. We actually had an experience with a bank fraud team recently and they relentlessly ask over and over "is the recipient in financial difficulty?". They're not passing judgement on them but trying to work out if you've been convinced that they are and you need to send them money [urgently] to help.
      • joenot443 2mo ago
        My aunt was recently hit by this scam, they used a deep fake of a teenager and she really believed it was my cousin. The lie was that he was stuck in Montreal and needed money for the next flight home. This happened in Canada. I don’t think having socialized healthcare makes as much of a difference as one would hope.
  • Hackbraten 2mo ago
    The problem is that many scammers now groom your brain into trusting them before they even mention money. This is a psychological thing where you can’t necessarily just tell yourself “I’m not going to fall for that.” There are reports from professional scambaiters who, after engaging with a phone scammer for a while, found themselves inexplicably clinging to the belief the scheme was real. This is possibly due to how our brains are wired to trust an already-established narrative and due to the effect that repeated interactions have on trust. When the scammer eventually steers the topic towards money, phenomena such as the Semmelweis reflex [0] may have already kicked in, which can make it super difficult to re-frame the person as a scammer. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex
• newman8r 2mo ago
  I assume AI assistants would be able to prevent a lot of this
  • HDBaseT 2mo ago
    It's an intriguing idea, but prompt injection and misleading the AI seem like fairly trivial things to do right?
  • aenis 2mo ago
    I dont think so. The LLMs are trained to play it safe and avoid responsibility for hard decisions. No commercial model will say "No, I wont connect your call, I dont think you are bleeding to death at this moment, I believe you are a scammer". Nope.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• 3RTB297 2mo ago
  Honestly, not really. The problem is that often the scams are symptoms of a larger problem. The elderly still want autonomy, and the scams adapt and change faster than education can get most of the elderly caught up to the risks. That's entirely removed from the technical aspects, which are a whole other level of education on risk. Scams always will move faster than defenders and efforts to block them. All of which are divorced from the real problem, which is isolation of the elderly. The elderly often jump in to these scams simply because they just want someone to chat with. Many romance scammers will report that all they do is strike up a conversation with people, and quite often that's all it takes to get in deeper on an emotional level than the victim's entire family. The family treats this like a money problem, when it's an emotional gap the scammer is exploiting. I had a neighbor once who was so poor her gas got turned off. Blind due to diabetes. Still managed to send half her meager social security check to a televangelist, because the televangelist was on TV in her face all day, and her family visited once a month. The elderly were prime candidates for 1-900 psychic numbers for decades because it was someone to talk to. I imagine your grandfather wanted to feel like he was helping someone, and scam letters gave him a perfect way to convince himself he was doing exactly that.
  • hnav 2mo ago
    so the solution in this brave new world is to preemptively fill the gap with benevolent chatbot penpals?
    • 3RTB297 2mo ago
      As an alternative to actually talking for them and being near them, maaaaaybe. Though, at that point you're introducing trust to something that attackers might learn to emulate enough to make it part of the scam one day. The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation.
• aenis 2mo ago
  The advice I gave to my folks -- hard ignore any contact attempts not initiated by them. Dont read, dont answer the phone except from recognized numbers. I think thats the only way. No legitimate businesses call or text people out of the blue these days. I dont believe in AI voice assistants picking up phones and filtering scammers. Those tbings will fight a losing game considering how the mainstream LLMs are built.
  • gambiting 2mo ago
    It would be great if not for the fact that at least over here in the UK your doctor or anyone from the NHS will always call you from a restricted number. So especially if you're elderly and have regular check ups or anything medical going on, the advice to "only answer known numbers" falls apart. And in my experience NHS receptionists have zero patience for the whole "tell me why you're calling" automated screens too, they just disconnect straight away.
    • aenis 2mo ago
      Yeah, I think thats a valid edge case - and a manageable one. If you are expecting a call from a doctor, lift the firewall for a while.
      • sigseg1v 2mo ago
        It gets a bit more complicated than that. I don't even regularly need things from my doctor, but I have a referral to a specialist right now, and the waiting time is around 16 months to be contacted by them. At that time they will randomly call me from a restricted number. So I must have all call screening and blocking off for probably 2 years in order to accommodate this. And I can't time it because in the past I was referred to a different one and they contacted me in only 4 months when they said 12+.
        • everybodyknows 2mo ago
          Had similar situation here in the US -- though with a more tolerable delay -- with a private health care provider. The fix of course is an enforced requirement from higher authority that health care providers communicate only by means that prove identity of the source -- never calling from an unverifiable number. How to make that happen, though ... ?
• weatherlite 2mo ago
  > Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift? You can become a legal guardian, and/or get access and shared ownership on their bank account and monitor it constantly. But yeah , it's a hassle.
• jen729w 2mo ago
  Encourage them to move their money to where it's at least more difficult to access. Recently I discovered that my mam – a middle-class ex-civil-servant, not rich, but not poor – had £++ sitting in the account that was linked to the Visa card she carries around all day. Why? Just because she hadn't moved it elsewhere. Terrifying, obviously. All she needed was my encouragement. I think it's in Premium Bonds now: not scam-proof, but at least not trivially scammable.
• deleted 2mo ago
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• elorant 2mo ago
  I had a similar problem with phone scams for my elder parents. Installed Asterisk with a Raspberry on their land line to allow only whitelisted numbers and the problem was solved. I guess someone has to step in at some point. Problem is not every parent has a tech literate child and the industry doesn’t seem to bother to offer decent solutions. All call blocker hardware that I found didn’t allow whitelist functionality. I guess there’s a business opportunity here easily, build hardware/software solutions to protect the elderly.
• alexpotato 2mo ago
  My elderly father uses a financial planner/wealth management firm. Their returns are not spectacular and they charge fees but overall they are net positive on returns. My sister and I were discussing if this was a great idea for him and she pointed out: "Really, he needs someone he can call to send a check somewhere or send a digital payment and he just calls them and they make it happen." Ideally, there would be a more generic service that would do this for the elderly. It would be the financial version of those "senior phones" that have big buttons and a "help" button that connects you to a person.
  • sbarre 2mo ago
    Even simpler: I wish banks would allow you to set up a requirement of MFA for transactions over a certain amount (with everyone's consent of course). My parents are not yet a concern for this stuff, but I imagine eventually they might be. So I would get a notification on my phone to approve the transaction/withdrawal.
• clsec 2mo ago
  "Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?" As it stands right now, no. Luckily, at least for now, I'm tech savvy enough to navigate it. But the 100, mostly immigrant, elderly residents of my building will not be so lucky. Two months ago I learned, during a water outage on a Saturday morning, that my building's new assistant manager was an AI bot from EliseAI. What was an actual emergency, it thought, was something that could be dealt with the following week. It told me that management would respond on Monday, which is completely unacceptable during an emergency water outage. I had no water for 3 days & on Monday the actual human manager waffled on why it wasn't immediately fixed & thought it was cute (he giggled & got excited) that I discovered that the assistant manager was now an AI bot. And just yesterday, I got an unsolicited text from an unknown number that looks exactly like a phishing scam attempt, except that it was sent by the assistant manager AI bot. The text said that I had $130 in unpaid rent & had links to remedy it. WHAT?!! First, it's illegal in CA to give a tenant notice that way. Second, it looked exactly like a phishing scam attempt. I obviously didn't click the links, but I did parse them & found that they belonged to EliseAI. This also happened a month after the human manager gave out a notice about back rent that I had already asked about. He told me I had $0.00 debt on the books. So why the AI bot phishing attempt? I perused EliseAI's privacy policy and there is no way that I will be knowingly feeding any PII into it. I haven't tracked down the manager yet to give him a piece of my mind. But in what world is this kind of activity OK? How are non-tech savvy folks going to survive these things? Especially the large non-English speaking elderly population in my building. As far as I can see (I live in SF & am surrounded by it), we're doomed.
• carlosjobim 2mo ago
  No, there is no way to help them. But the coming generations of elderly will be more resistant, as they've grown up in an all-scam society. You could stand in real life in front of your parents or grandparents while they're talking on the phone to a scammer pretending to be you, and they would rather believe the scammer than believe you. The current generation of elderly have great disdain and distrust for their children and grandchildren, and the highest respect and deference towards any perceived authority, and especially if they are contacting them through mail or phone. It's just the hyena mindset: Kiss ass of those you perceive to be higher in rank than you, kick down on those you perceive to be lower in rank than you. You could be the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and your elderly relatives would rather believe a scammer calling and pretending to be their banker than believe you.
  • zbentley 2mo ago
    I hope you’re right. Anecdotally based on the significant number of young, digital native people I know who are getting successfully scammed, I’m not sure.
• IG_Semmelweiss 2mo ago
  neutralize largest threat surface, work your way down. First is email. Have their login. Then can-spam everything from nigerian princes. Usually if they have been pig butchered in some way before, they are "hot targets". SO they will continue to receive emails until the algo has been retrained to reject the massive amount of junk they likely get. Set up tons of filters as well. The 2nd threat surface are landlines, since they usually have been around for a while and the number has been passed around. Force VM-only for unknown callers. Then have VM transcribed and sent over to you. Scammers will not usually leave VM so its an autofilter. Anything important, you can relay. With LLMs this becomes considerably easier.