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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 fas
by 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 agoso the solution in this brave new world is to preemptively fill the gap with benevolent chatbot penpals?
- 3RTB297 2mo agoAs 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.