This seems like as good a place as any to discuss. What steps have you taken to protect your parents from these and other scams? I'm looking for both technological and non-technological ideas and any info on what has or hasn't worked.
I've told my parents and in-laws (mid 70s) two things (they're cognitively with-it as far as mid-70s people go, I don't know what advice would work for people who are losing their mental faculties). The things I told them are:
1) Gift card = scam. Always, 100% of the time. No government agency and no legitimate company will ask for payment via gift cards, ever. My in-laws nearly got scammed by "Apple support" calling to say their router had been hacked and was being used for illegal activity and that they needed to pay using iTunes gift cards to have "Apple support" "clean out their router".
2) Nothing is immediately urgent. Unless someone is dying in front of you, the problem can be solved later. Banks, government bureaucracies, lawsuits, etc all work via snail mail and lawyers and paperwork, not by calling you up and telling you you're going to jail and are going to lose all your money unless you do something immediately.
3) Never, ever, ever tell anyone anything if they contacted you. If it's the bank calling, or the government, or insurance, or the power company, or anyone else, say "Thanks, I'll call you back". Hang up the phone, wait an hour then find the phone number yourself (look on your bank card or whatever) and initiate contact with the company.
Same goes for emails. DON'T click links in emails. Delete the email. Wait an hour or two then research the phone number to call and initiate contact.
I will never even have a phone conversation with someone that called me (other than friends, of course)
To point 2, there are scam calls in Asia that would show up as your child's phone number, with someone saying they're from the hospital, the child has been in an accident, they're going to operate but they need payment first. I guess even in the "bad parts" of the world doctors would never delay treatment due to money, but maybe some parents don't consider this in their panic.
I wonder if having a duress as well as normal password (like in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx77j1vl4d8) is useful, but obviously if the caller is pretending the person is incapacitated, that goes out the window.
You are very lucky to live in a country where you can't even imagine that's an option. In countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, ... doctors won't see you if you can't pay. In some places you even have to provide donor blood to be able to get an operation! Leading to nightmares like this:
Once she was able to see the system behind the calls, that screened out 90+%. There are still banks that call her every week to try and convince her to refinance her mortgage on terrible terms. The best antidotes to this are financial security (even if what you're telling me is true, I don't need to do it to make ends meet), financial literacy, and hard-and-fast rules.
1. Never give any information over the phone. Particularly financial or identifying information.
2. If you feel sold or pressured, tell the person that you need to go to the bathroom, and that you'll call them back. Then, call me and we'll talk through it together.
I got a couple phone calls from my mom over the next couple weeks, but they built her confidence to the point where she can spot the scams out very clearly now.
I can't imagine how difficult this would be, if my parents had short-term memory loss or worse. This industry is really soul-crushing, and the FCC needs to stomp it out.
1. Between TMobile's "Name ID" app, and Google's call scammer screening, I very, very rarely get any scam calls through anymore. That's a huge change from recent experience for me.
2. I absolutely love Android's "screen calls" feature, where it does speech-to-text over the phone. 9 times out of 10 it just discourages scammers from going further.
3. Most importantly I think is just to train (and practice!) people that if they don't recognize a caller, just hang up. Don't talk, don't apologize, nothing, just hang up. People are socially conditioned to think that's rude, etc., but it today's age, that is by far the safest thing to do.
I've installed AT&T call protect on my families phones, and I run the family accounts for the cell phones and streaming services. I setup all tech for the family to make sure adblocking, virus scanning, updates are done in a timely manner. iPhone+iPad has done wonders for my mom's tech skills and I don't have to worry about viruses anymore, it just works for her. My mom knows that I am always available for her to contact me anytime someone wants more than $200 from her. The family will forward me any emails that they think are suspicious for me review.
