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The problem is not going to be solved by elder education. The mind decays to a state where education doesn't matter in the long run. Manipulation tactics with consistency will win when dealing with an elder person who is not the same person everyday because simple things have become a chore. Basically the responsibility should never be on a person above 60. People need to demand responsibility in full by banks & phone carriers. The young generation don't necessarily have a moral duty in this because the current generation is getting shit on by the previous. If anything I doubt anyone cares unless they have greed for inheritance or love their "own" family members.

I think one solution people have come up with is to have older family members put money into "trust" in which they are the beneficiaries. Presumably having this setup, while it costs money, prevents someone who is loosing thier faculties from being able to be scammed as they don't have direct access to all their money.

Going after the scammers would also be helpful, as I haven't seen much enforcement.

Speaking as an older person, a relative bringing that up would raise red flags for me ;)

It’s very sound financial advice. It’s especially valuable for married couples where the risks essentially double.

Diminishing mental capacity is a very real issue. You might feel this is extremely unlikely, but you only need to fail once.

Well, setting up the trust could itself be the fail.

Consider one of the examples in TFA. Philip Marshall sought guardianship of his grandmother, Brooke Astor. To protect her from his father, Anthony Marshall. Sure, Anthony Marshall eventually went to jail. But I can easily imagine a version where Philip Marshall was the villain.

Sure, this stuff is not without risk. But, personally I would rather go through this stuff as for example a mentally sound 70 year old and then just not worry about it.

It’s like keeping 20k in a checking account. It’s a good idea to have cash on hand and safer than keeping such money at home, but plenty of people had that money stolen via electronic transfer. Choosing which risks to take and how much effort you’re willing to spend avoiding those risks is just part of life.

PS: My Mothers financial adviser put it like this: “Do you trust your kids? If you do then you can simply things, but if you don’t their are other steps you can take.” Personally, I don’t nessisarily trust my future self to make great choices all the time, but if you do then don’t worry about this stuff.

> Personally, I don’t nessisarily trust my future self to make great choices all the time, but if you do then don’t worry about this stuff.

I get that. It's a tough problem. What I wonder is whether my future self might make choices that seem bad now, and would seem bad to a guardian, but might make sense for me then. Or at least, would be what I wanted to do, then.

I am betting that I won't become more trusting as I get older. Or at least, that's not been the pattern, so far.

A trust is very important for retaining an inheritance for heirs if you're ever placed in a nursing home. If you're in a home, Medicaid will require you to spend almost all of your assets down before it will pay for nursing home care (Medicare does not pay for nursing homes). You can avoid this by placing your assets in a trust. You must do this at least 5 years before entering a nursing home or Medicaid can go after sheltered assets.

https://info.legalzoom.com/shelter-assets-nursing-home-care-...

A better option is to buy long term care insurance.

The gov't says they need total phone surveillance to watch for terrorists, but can't seem to keep a flood of criminals from using the same phone line to say they are from the IRS and still billions from our elderly. How can they protect me from a terrorist if they can't protect my mom from a scammer?

They don't really care to protect your mom from a scammer. They probably could if they really wanted to, they just don't care to.

I mean they cracked down on the mafia, RICO and all that. You really think they can't nab a few phone scammers?

Last time I checked there the war on drugs was lost and criminal activities are doing pretty good in the US.

But I agree nonetheless that this kind of activity is certainly at the very bottom of their preoccupation.

It even surprises me because elderly are good voters so it should be politically beneficial to solve their problem, especially when it's something as simple and non-partisan as this. It seems so easy to just say "We protect our elderly and jail the awful criminals to abuse them" and just do it and win some nice popular vote for a super small cost, seems weird that it does not happen.

The sale of medical data makes it worse. My dad had a stroke a few years ago, and they now get hundreds of calls per week for various scsmmy medical things.

I thought medical data was one of the things we had privacy laws on.

Law are only followed by people who decide to follow them. Scammers typically don’t follow laws, especially when they are rarely enforced.

Of course scammers don't, but where did they get the data? That's who needs to be sued.

The problem there is data is fungible. Did it come from a hospital, a doctor, an IT contractor, which of several of those, etc? It could be impossible to tell.

Think again! Things like hospital admissions, prescriptions and other things are available in near real time to many entities.

This is a problem for everyone and not just the elderly. There have been large increased in the number of spam calls each year recently. 2018 is the first year the volume of spam calls surpassed legitimate calls.

> 2018 is the first year the volume of spam calls surpassed legitimate calls

Do you have a source on this?

That seems like an exaggeration. Or at least, maybe they've been hot-listed for some reason. My wife and I are well over 60, and we get at most one or two junk calls per day. Also, we don't answer any calls from unknown numbers (that is, not known to our base unit). If it's legitimate, they'll leave a message.

Edit: How does "hot" become "host"? I have no clue.

Yeah, I think it's definitely not just age. I'm in my early 40s and I now get 15-20 calls a day on my cell phone. Twice that, at least, on my desk phone at work.

That’s a spam call every ten or fifteen minutes at work. Sorry, not believable. You are on the do not call list, right? (I get, maybe, one call a day.)

Well, fortunately I'm not trying to convince you ;-). You can choose to believe it or not, I'm just relating my own absurd experience with spam calls.

At this point I'm ready to throw the towel in on the POTS network and move it all onto the data network. The ILECs have proven unwilling to address the problem and now their network has turned to crap. On my cell phone I can deal with it by whitelisting, but my desk phone is not so advanced.

You can buy call-blocking devices for POTS lines.

Have they been scammed before? Or been made as good marks?

I've got an elderly relative who fell into something that I swear followed a lead generation funnel. Accepted some semi-legitimate domestic computer services help (optimize your PC and scan for spyware by some company from Utah), only to have the full hammer come down a few weeks later with a follow up from an Indian call center that commandeered her PC, made fake deposits to her bank account, turned on her camera and showed he could see everything, and insisted she purchase $500 in iTunes cards to pay for the malware removal. After wising up, the same center called her multiple times daily for more than a year from various spoofed numbers.

If they're getting calls every 30 minutes, it's likely they've become a qualified lead in some way, by something they've done.

That happened to my wife a couple years ago :(

But she was smart enough to hang up, shutdown the box, and wait for me to wake up. So I booted with a Debian LiveCD, grabbed all her data, and replaced the SSD. The old one is now a RAID member in one of my play boxes.

Since no one else seems to want to deal with it, is there a potential for "vigilante justice" here? Have one of those air horns people use at sport events or other obnoxious audible device. Get a call, give em an earful. Might be enough to get off a list somewhere.

Doubtful. I'm pretty sure the phone speaker isn't even capable of producing the frequency or volume necessary to do any real damage, you'd mostly just be hurting everyone in earshot.

Now if you had suggested that vigilantes actually get off their asses and find these people and do horrible things to them, you might have something. Of course, as cathartic as it sounds, vigilantism is generally frowned upon for good reason.

15 years back i once tracked down a "boiler room" operation that was annoying me with incrementing dialer calls. I visited a little vigilante justice on them (smoking drugs in front of the webcam, heheh, heck it turned out everyone there was a meth user, local drug task force made an easy bust). They switched to an offshore call center site a few weeks later. Seems the dialer was selling the calls and there was no shortage of bidders. It's a pervasive and endemic corruption and there's no end to it. It's a cockroach-scale problem.

>The FCC and phone carriers have proven for decades that they don't give a single shit.

Imagine if good governance meant anything in today's political climate.

Is there any reason to not encourage them to use a cellphone configured to only accept calls from a whitelist of numbers?

Sure, many people want to leave the door open for distant relatives/friends to phone them if needed.

My parents are immigrants and would about once a year get a phone call from some person I had never heard of from back home, usually when a friend of the family died back in the motherland.

Your proposal would prevent such calls from succeeding.

how is a distant relative going to find anyone's cellphone number? That makes absolute no sense, since cellphone numbers aren't posted in a public directory that distant relatives might honestly peruse.

It’s a small world—you can find most people just by walking your social network.

“Hey, do you Carol’s number? I want to let her know about Aunt Bertha’s funeral.”

“No, but my sister goes to yoga with her daughter. Let me put you in touch.”

I'm talking about elderly people, from the era of land-lines and phone books. They want to be maximally reachable at the numbers dispersed long ago. They're often very lonely and it only gets worse as all their peers fade away, the last thing they want is to obstruct any potential genuine contact.

To suggest they setup a whitelists where only their active set of connections may reach them demonstrates a profound lack of understanding and empathy for the elderly.

Furthermore, it's important to keep in mind elderly immigrants are usually even more stuck in the past, having grown up in nations lagging in most ways behind the USA. When I visit where my parents came from, it's like visiting a museum.

How they get the numbers is obvious, I don't think you've made any attempt to think about this. They tap into the friends network, people search through their phone books and give out numbers. It's how things used to be.

> To suggest they setup a whitelists where only their active set of connections may reach them demonstrates a profound lack of understanding and empathy for the elderly.

Maybe you let everything go to voicemail. Or if they're too far gone for that, you route it to your voicemail. And just pass along what's legitimate.

My parents solved this problem with WhatsApp. Everyone contacts everyone via WhatsApp. Somehow there’s no spam calling on WhatsApp.

Yes, because of legitimate calls that are, indeed, important. Doctors and specialists and hospitals for starters. Your elderly spouse slip and fall while at the grocery store yet has a card with your phone number on it calls you. A friend who has had a landline gets a cell phone as well and calls. A hairdresser or other such place confirming an appointment.

The list of these scenarios goes on. They are greatly outnumbered by the scam calls, but aren't few enough not to be an issue - especially the ones with doctor's and so on.

Google's spam number service on android is rather good, but not enough...

What happened to the Do-Not-Call list? Is that dead or just not enforced?

Lamentably only honest brokers follow it. Non-profits don't have to I think, and scammers just ignore it. Caller ID is more than useless as it always seems spoofed.

We've lost control of our telephone network.

Caller ID can be useful for letting every number you don't recognize go to voicemail.

Yes, that is for sure the way to go.

Enforcement of the Do-Not-Call list seems rather sparse.

"To date, the Commission has brought 134 enforcement actions against companies and telemarketers for Do Not Call, abandoned call, robocall and Registry violations. To date, 121 of these FTC enforcement actions have been resolved, and in those cases the agency has recovered over $50 million in civil penalties and $71 million in redress or disgorgement."

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/do-not-call-...

Get a new phone number. Your parents sound like they're on a list.