My elderly parents can't resist answering the phone | Hacker News Reader

My elderly parents can't resist answering the phone

bogleheads.org

99 pointsilamont101 comments

At the age of 90+, there's probably an element of enjoying answering the phone to just talk to someone, even if it is a scammer.

Loneliness is a major issue for the elderly and due to culture of the time, there's a lot of resistance to do something about it.

I wonder if there's a service where you can sign-up to be randomly connected to other elderly people. Omegle for the elderly.

There is actually an international NGO, Little Brothers - Friends of the Elderly [0], that exists exactly to help lonely elderly people meet others and have a new social life. There are several chapters in the USA [1].

While not very well known, it's a really old NGO, started in 1946 in Switzerland, with the US wing existing since 1959.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brothers_%E2%80%93_Fr...

[1] https://lbfenetwork.org/#network

Absolutely. I worked very briefly and regrettably as a cold-call telemarketer and the vast majority of the people who would stay on the line were elderly and seemed to enjoy talking to a friendly person who wanted to sell them fake supplements. I still feel bad about the one sale I made.

A lot of elderly are of sound mind I’m sure the one you sold to knew exactly what they wanted.

He certainly sounded like he was sound of mind, but even I didn't know what I was selling. We already had their credit card info on file, so we were taught all we needed was a "yes" from the customer, and after a while of chatting I think he wanted to be nice and gave me the "yes". I just hope he could afford it.

> I wonder if there's a service where you can sign-up to be randomly connected to other elderly people.

It's not specific to elderly people but back when I used Dialup[0] many of my matches were elderly folk who just enjoyed talking to someone about what's going on in their life and telling stories about their youth.

[0] https://dialup.com/

This being HN, I can't help but point out apps like CallAnnie to be able to have a conversation with an LLM.

If that was the case, they would try to make it a game, no? Trying to keep the scammers on the line for as long as possible.

One of the best changes of the last 20 years is the quiet you can have in your home because of the lack of landlines. It was collective insanity to have such a loud device constantly interrupting us.

I'm surprised that my older relatives, some old enough to have grown up without phones in their house, don't leap at the chance to get rid of them

> It was collective insanity to have such a loud device constantly interrupting us.

Not to mention all the bruised toes and shins from running for it. Especially prior to answering machines being ubiquitous, at the risk of dating myself.

Oh of course, it was an emergency! Nothing could be more important than answering the phone.

Very few things are worth literally running toward. Even fire drills involve walking to evacuate.

My elderly mother-in-law is pretty good about the scams but the part that I can’t understand is that she treats every land line phone call as the highest priority thing in the house. She will drop everything to answer the phone.

It's what we all grew up with if you're older than about 50. The phone rings, you answer it. It's a habit. Even caller id wasn't really common, and it cost extra.

OTOH I'm in that age group. I dropped my landline a long time ago, and I never answer calls on my mobile unless the caller is in my address book. I don't have voice mail either. The habit of answering the phone was not hard to stop, there was a bit of FOMO (if you can call it that) for a while, but every time I answered such a call it was a scammer or a survey or some other nonsense so that's pretty much gone away.

Maybe for those that are truly elderly it's just something to break up the boredom of sitting at home.

It is worse than that. For those old enough to remember, at least in the USA the old Bell System ad's from the 50's and 60's were to be sure to answer all calls within three rings. That 'within three' part got burned into the minds of the generation that is 75+ now, which is why so many of them treat a ringing phone as 'absolute number one priority'. Me, I heard the #*$&$ thing ring so much growing up, with 80-90% being sales calls, that I can listen to a phone ring, ignore it, and go on about whatever it is I was doing that the caller so rudely wanted to interupt.

No I don't remember that. In elementary school at some point we had a little lesson on using the phone, how to answer, what to say if your parents weren't home, etc. They told us it's rude to let the phone ring more than 10 times if you are calling someone. I don't remember anything about answering within 3 (or any number) of rings.

i wonder if the within-three-rings push dates to when there were actual operators connecting calls. their employer would not want them to be spending a lot of time waiting.

> I don't have voice mail either.

isn't that standard for most providers? plus, even if most of the calls are scams or pointless, some might not be, and I'd rather get a message than not.

I just mean I never set it up, and I never check it. I don't even know how to check it, or whether it's recording messages or not.

> I can’t understand is that she treats every land line phone call as the highest priority thing in the house. She will drop everything to answer the phone.

I'm 30 and haven't been able to break myself of this. When I was a kid scam calls just were not a thing where I lived and if someone was calling it mattered. Absolutely nothing took priority over the phone.

I used to have my landline wired up to a blinking light and I kept the ringer off.

I still keep the ringer off, but now I never answer my phone 'cause it's always in my pocket and I can't see it.

You were the smartest of us all.

My elderly in-laws have lept at the chance to get rid of landlines, only to be replaced by near constant WeChat or iMessage pings. It was this at this point that I discovered that they’re not alone and most people live with near constant mobile notification bombardment, putting almost zero effort in taming it. It took me a while to condition them to use the silence slider which they were barely aware of. Then it made me wonder if messenger apps were actually an improvement. Landlines had the advantage of being completely out of mind when you’re away from home.

Mobile phones & modern notification systems are strictly better in terms of flexibility. As you said, you can silence all notifications for arbitrary periods of time and schedule quiet times, but if you need you can still access them any time you want. Landlines' async notification channel is limited to a voicemail, which... well, it sucks.

Definitely agree there, I’m not proposing going back to landlines or any variation. That said, I feel like the fact that just about any app you install signs you for all the notifications all the time is a bit of a dark pattern.

Totally agree with that, the first time an app sends me an ad/nag disguised as a notification, it gets blackholed.

Related, I really like the notification summary feature of iOS - it delays showing you a notification and rolls all them up into a summary every (configurable) N hours. You can exclude priority apps e.g. a messenger you know you want realtime notifs from.

I was sitting at a table at a sports club the other day where a young fella had put down his phone. It lit up and I saw a terrifying stack of notifications, 20+ messages per app, more apps than space on the lock screen. If I get one then I read it and it I get too many that I don't read then I stop them because they're clearly about something I'm better off reading at my leisure rather than being alerted.

My iPhone looks like that because you have to manually interact with or swipe to clear notifications to remove them from the stack. And usually I get all the information I need by looking at the preview.

I recommend turning off most notifications in the settings except the ones you absolutely need for your work and family. iOS has a pretty good level of granularity.

They're bored. It's a lot of work to stand up and leave the house. Phonecalls are the most convenient and accessible human interaction they have. My grandmother loves talking to people she knows are scammers, just to ease the tedium. She's been talking to the same neighbors and children for literally fifty years otherwise.

Phones weren't such a loud device constantly interrupting us. When they became this, people stopped having them.

The was called the phone being "off the hook" where you lifted the receiver and put it to the side.

In the UK, a siren goes off if you do this for more than like 15 mins.

You can of course just unplug the whole phone at the wall - but you have to do that for every one in the hosue.

> a siren goes off if you do this for more than like 15 mins

What? Is there a place I can read more about this or hear what it sounds like? Is it an actual siren or just a tone to remind you that it's off the hook?

it's a tone played through the earpiece speaker, but it is very loud - ie. loud enough you can hear it from another room in your house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-hook_tone#:~:text=In%20the....

I assume phones have to be designed with the earpiece speaker robust enough not to be fried by such a tone, and therefore it must have been around for a long time.

It’s very similar to the sound that dialing a phone (touch tone) makes, but higher pitched and pulsed four times a second. It was VERY LOUD, enough to cause pain if you put it up to your ear. The idea was to help let you know that your phone fell off the receiver even if you weren’t nearby.

Edit: the reason this matters is that call waiting was not a standard feature. So if your phone was off the hook, it would not be able to ring and receive a call, the person calling you would just get a “busy signal” which is a lower pitched two-tone beep that is on and off every second. You still hear that from time to time in modern phone systems when they are overloaded.

My grandparents didn't have a phone until fairly late, but my grandfather worked irregular hours on the docks. For them a landline is the peace of mind of knowing loved ones are safe.

Mobile phones are useless because they are never charged when you need them.

I dont know if you have it in the USA but this device is pretty good:

https://www.truecall.co.uk/shop/truecall-call-blocker

You connect it to the phone line and it answers the calls and asks people who they are. At that point it lets the actual phone ring and then it tells you who is calling and do you want to accept the call or block?

Most spammers will not say who they are and just hang up.

Over time it builds up a whitelist of who to just let straight through

Its very simple

If they had that for cell phones I'd pay almost any amount to get that for my grandma. She really doesn't need to answer the phone unless it's us, but she does.

It's a free feature from Google for their Pixel phones: https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/9118387?hl=en

Wow that's amazing! Does the iPhone have something like that?

iOS 17 comes with a voicemail transcription feature. Not sure how useful that would be since I don't even remember when was the last time I got a voicemail, everyone just hangs and sends a WhatsApp message (if anything) at least in my country.

Phone -> Silence Unknown Callers is close, it'll only let callers in your contacts ring the phone, everyone else will be sent to voicemail (and still show up in call history so you can add them as a contact easily).

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT207099

Also looks like you can set up external apps to maintain block lists and filter based on that rather than your address book, but nothing that would act as a concierge to prompt callers.

Google voice has this feature for free.

It's disappointing that the US government hasn't done more to stop this.

In this specific case, the author should probably see if he can get his parents put in a conservatorship. That would at least help limit the damage when one of the scams does eventually work.

I was hoping STIR/SHAKEN would fix the problem but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference at all.

STIR/SHAKEN probably has helped a bit, but the amount of times my dad has infected his phone with viruses and been "called back" by someone after a robodialer called them shows that regulating the "good guys" hasn't really stopped the bad guys much, just made their list of targets somewhat smaller.

The US government is often the source of the calls. During election season, my elderly mother's landline gets BOMBARDED with calls from politicians. "Hello! This is Representative Blah. I'm calling to let you know how terrible my opponent is..."

a candidate's political campaign is not an official government communication. that goes for even if they're currently in office.

The other side of the coin is that even if they aren't receptive to the scams, they stop answering the phone as much, which contributes to them losing even more contact with people.

I have a half-hearted Asterisk setup. When my dad was alive, I set up an Obi110 hooked up to the phone line. I created a whitelist of numbers of family and friends. Anything not on the whitelist was answered by Asterisk, the SIT tone played, and then a message "please try your call again". Its CID was then stored in a one-entry database "greylist" so that a subsequent call from the same number would ring normally. The sheer majority of telemarketers don't call twice in a row.

When I set it up I actually fat-fingered my uncle's number on the whitelist. He got the "error message" and dutifully called right back, so I felt pretty comfortable that the system wouldn't fail terribly.

In general it's a thorny problem, especially when both parents are alive as they'll generally enable each other by insisting that business as usual is fine. Knowing what I know now, I'd try to push in harder to make changes that needed to be made, but it's so much easier said than done.

I can sell you a little box that you plug their phone into and it will answer the phone and present a phone tree:

"If you want to speak to Marv, press 1. If you want to speak to Pat, press 2. If you know the name of the person who lives here, press 3."

If the caller presses 3, they have to punch in the first 3 letters of the name of the person they are trying to reach.

If, instead, the caller punches in 5284, it routes the call through.

All other calls or terminated without the phone ringing.

This can also work for cellphones with a cheaper box, but takes a little more effort to configure.

I've been thinking about doing it more basic: "Please enter the extension"

I'd make '7777' be the only "extension" that gets through. Callers that are in my contacts wouldn't even get the prompt. The doctor's office, school administrators, or any other not-a-contact-but-still-wanted caller would know what my "extension" is.

I’ve been thinking the same thing. You could even treat extensions as tokens and whitelist numbers only if they call the right extension.

Essentially, that's what 5284 is--an extension. The "Dial 1, Dial 2" is just to waste the time of human bad actors. If you can keep them on the line for just 20-30 seconds longer, you cut their call volume down considerably and perform a public service.

Ye well not answering the phone used to be a thing that you just did not do. I guess you forget that times change when you get ... forgetfull.

I have hard time admitting it, but I think it was easier to reach people in the 90s. Between 5pm and 8pm you could just call.

There's a huge problem in the US where custodianship is used to take advantage of senior citizens. People who can take care of themselves are often trapped, abused, and outright stolen from using that system.

However, this is the kind of case where custodianship is probably the right answer. If they're falling for a gift card scam, it may be best that a trusted loved one is given the literal and figurative keys for their own protection.

Something is not right with the general telephone system. That this can be going on without more being done about it. In the internet space, we have our email providers filtering spam for us. But nothing like this when you sign up for a phone number. I don't know why there is not fierce competition about it. It must have something to do with what is and is not allwed for a telephone operator.

The system was designed for a different age and doesn't include the same trust signals as email (which includes the actual email content). If the phone system was invented today (anyone can just dial any number and make ringing sounds in anyone's home!) we would consider it preposterous.

That's true, but the strange thing is it has hardly evolved from that. Why does not my phone operator allow me to set policies / firewalls in place, at their end? All such filtering now needs to happen in my actual phone.

What's wrong with filtering in your phone? It's a much simpler solution, and has the advantage that your contact list doesn't need to be stored in a central location where it is freely available to employees, law enforcement, and hackers.

What would the UI to the PBXes look like? Back in the 80s, what limited programming we could do was done by pressing numbers and the asterisk/pound key. Sometimes "flashing" the hook. If we're lucky, voice prompts. It was crap.

So you want to add some sort of digital protocol between phones and PBXes (of countless different types) so that our contact lists and rules (like "don't ring for these numbers between 10pm and 8am") can be maintained by an insecure central authority?

I think the technology branch we're on is better. It's certainly more personally empowering.

I live in my hometown. It's not a big city, but the tech scene is surprisingly good and I think objectively it's a pretty good place to live.

Many of my friends have moved to bigger cities and we'll try to get together when they're in town. Inevitably the conversation turns to, "how are your parents doing?" and often it's not good news. People used to come home for fun, but now it's usually because something bad happened.

On another post I mentioned my parents' policy of, "if I didn't call you, I don't want it" and I am thankful every day for the problems we don't have.

Recently my elderly mother's been getting calls where the caller ID is "spoofed" with someone actually associated to her. She's received calls that say my name and a phone number I used in college, many years ago. She even received a phone call from her brother who died in 2019.

I answer the phone every time a scammer calls and put the phone back in my pocket without hanging up. Yes this might increase how many calls I get, but that's ok.

Is there an endlessh for spam calls? Let an ai just sit there and drive them slowly insane so they have less time to defraud other people?

What I actually started doing is setting my voicemail greeting to a fax machine tone. In Google voice you can also put spammers into a penalty box, so only they get the fax machine. This stopped a lot of my spam calls.

I used to have my answering machine start with a "1" dial tone, which made all the bots connect real people to talk to my regular greeting, and real callers weren't too bothered by it. Nowadays it's harder to use something that doesn't also trick real callers.

There is overlap between the smartest robocall software and dumbest humans. To be charitable people are not expecting an instruction of "We are screening incoming calls. To ring through press 1." and often react by hanging up thinking they dialed the wrong number. And calling again.

Yeah, even something that doesn't trick the real callers will at least be annoying. Some things just say "call again to be connected," but robo-callers seem to have caught on.

There's a very simple version of this where a recording of a confused but very polite and cooperative elderly man answers the phone and speaks when the other person pauses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)

https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny-th...

https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

Some of the recordings are pretty fun. Some scammers stay on the phone with him for almost an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM

I found a recording of Lenny at work, this is absolutely brilliant. No ai, just responds in a loop and is extremely well engineered to infuriate the scammers.

Yes but the hard part is knowing who to send to it. Currently, services for this use a honeypot to gather spammers' numbers; not sure how that works given that they spoof it anyway.

Also any off-phone service relies on setting up forwarding from some voip number, which is never quite the same as a real one.

I used to intentionally answer robocalls, press 1, and try to transfer then to Lenny. A lot of spam center callers would hang up as soon as I said I was transferring them. One of the spammers I managed to connect to Lenny asked their coworker what was going on and the coworker recognized the Lenny script. I roped in another spammer for several minutes while they tried to sell to Lemmy.

You should avoid answering spam calls if it can be helped. If you don't pick up, your number will be marked as inactive in your system and they won't bother to call you in the future

It costs them nothing to try, as often a human is not involved in the initial call, only being looped in if the call is answered.

I dont know if its that these folks are slowing down - or less capable mentally, or if the world has changed so much from their youth that they're unable to deal with the change.

My 90 year old grandfather is able to deal with the changed world, surprisingly so.

Can somebody who works in the industry explain why it's so difficult for telcos to trace and block a high volume of dodgy calls with spoofed caller id that are likely originating from overseas?

I'm guessing the part about it originating overseas makes things difficult. Phone has similar auth weakness as email, another kind of federated communication. In this day and age, I can still get a fake email "from myself" in Gmail, and it can't even be sure that it's fake.

What’s that saying?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”

This issue could have been solved a long time ago if the companies (and regulators) actually cared about solving it

The Public Switched Telephone Network is effectively a series of proxies. Some of these are in foreign countries. Each phone companies earns revenue in proportion to the volume of calls flowing through (termination fees). Upgrading their legacy PSTN switches to SIP softswitches that support SHAKEN/STIR costs money. No one wants to invest in a legacy market (voice calls). So they have an incentive to delay deploying countermeasures.

What surprises me is that it has taken the US Gov. so long to act on this. And even more than that, that it took the Telcos so long -- and they've still barely done anything. It is destroying their business. And now the spam is being allowed to creep into the cell market.

The fact that we all have to screen our calls is just insane. Makes phones almost useless for their intended task.

I don’t know that the telcos care one whit about degradation of trust in telephony; they’re effectively ISPs at this point and telephony is a legacy service.

Multiple marketing calls per hour? Why? I get maybe two per week on my land line, maybe one per month on cell. I don't answer "Hello" for any unknown caller, because "Hello" is recognized by predictive dialers. So I usually get silence and hang up.

I wonder if it recognizes languages that don't have greetings. Try Klingon next time: "nuqneH"

I'm sure they have lists of easily exploitable elders. You aren't on the list. It's still a problem.

"Multiple marketing calls per hour? Why?"

I imagine answering these calls gets you added to lists of easy marks that those companies sell each other.

I have an uncle with mental illness who will click on anything that tells him he's won something or respond to anyone who tells him the same. His phone rings like this. What I don't understand about these lists is that he has essentially no money so while in some sense he might be an easy mark, he is uneconomical to spend any time scamming.

I get between 3 and 15 per day. It’s often the same people over and over. There’s one guy with a voice I recognize and I tried to tell him he calls me frequently and he assured me that is not the case. So I told him our secret word will be crocodile and every time you call me, I’m going to say that word.

Later that day he called back again and I said “crocodile” and he responded “I haven’t called you before” and hung up.

Normally I keep my ringer off so I only know how many calls I get by looking at the list of missed calls but some days I need to have my ringer on.

I get 3-5 marketing calls on my cell everyday, including weekends, and sometimes starting at 6:30am

Some I’ve been able to block by using an app to block all calls from Texas

But a lot of the calls are from area codes which I don’t want to block the whole range for

The only good alternative is to keep my phone on Do not Disturb

Someone has identified that this phone number has two elderly people who have a non-zero chance of giving them a large portion of their savings. And they sell that data to people who want to make use of it. It's targeted ads, just over the phone.

Someone years ago gave a random number (which was mine) to some telemarketer, and now I get many many calls and texts every day from people who think I am her. Impossible to block since they come from everywhere. https://thecodist.com/i-am-not-betty-and-i-cant-do-anything-...

I never answer my phone anymore.

It's awful how many scams there are, and how many people fall victim to them, but on a somewhat lighter note, my grandma (age 84) loves to play games with them when they call.

They'll say "it's me, your grandson, I've been arrested in [foreign country] and I need money!"

and she'll go "Which grandson are you? I can never keep all you dang kids straight." Or she'll pretend to get mad and tell them they owe her money!

She doesn't typically answer the phone for unknown numbers not in her area code, but that doesn't filter out all of them. She's sharp enough that I'm not overly worried yet, though.

What is it going to be for us, when we get that old?

I can not imagine I would become like that but maybe we are missing something about human brain at old age?

My dad is getting up there in age now. He has been on the internet since its birth, and is very familiar and savvy with how it works. He knows how DNS and HTTPS and DKIM, etc. work at a very technical level. He knows how search engines work and ads work at a technical and business level. He is familiar with all of the scams and their types, thanks to me getting him into watching scam-bait streamers/tubers.

The other day he had a flight home from an upcoming trip cancelled on him by Frontier. They sent him an email to notify him. He verified the email was legitimately from them. Frontier wanted him to resolve the issue on their website, but my mom was panicking and pressuring him to just call customer service. It turns out Frontier literally does not have a customer service phone number, so every single result on Google is actually a scam call center. While he was slightly flustered about his plans being changed and my mom freaking out, he had a momentary lapse in his scam-dar and just followed the first official looking link for Frontier customer service in Google search results. They “helped” him “resolve” his problem, but in the process asked him for his credit card number. At the end of the call he asked them to send a confirmation email, and he immediately noticed that the mail was spoofed and not from a Frontier domain despite everything looking very official. He then gave them some very choice words and immediately cancelled his card.

I guess my point is that scams are so prevalent these days that even very sharp and savvy people can still get caught up in it sometimes. It’s also pretty insane that Frontier just doesn’t have a phone number. It’s also downright criminal that Google is happy to help scammers as long as they get a cut of the profit.

A mental engram will be copied from you and applied to an AI agent that will be set up to filter content for you.

From it's perspective, it will sit around browsing some link aggregator site. By engaging with the content, it will selectively block content from the user, respond to content in lieu of the user, or pass content onto the user. In some cases, it passes responses back from the user, but the agent will believe it thought of the response on it's own.

The agent can do other menial tasks that don't translate to browsing a message board, and those things will appear to it as having a life outside of browsing the internet.

My dad does this, but he’s also hard of hearing so he can’t understand what they’re pitching half the time. So mostly he just answers so that he can cuss them out. Unfortunately, he’s done that to friends, medical offices, and relatives who call from an unknown number. Landline only, of course. I tell him not to answer, but he does anyway.

> A couple of months ago he got a call saying he owned a fine (payable by gift card) for not showing up for jury duty. He got in the car (yes, he still drives... that's a whole other subject) and went to the courthouse to pay the fine, which obviously didn't exist. He chalked it up to a "mistake".

My elderly parent literally gave rando people from Russia and India remote desktop control of her computer multiple times while she was trying to get a printer fixed or something. It blew my mind...

The wild thing is that more often than not they actually do fix the printer for you, but they also scam the heck out of you at the same time.

Question for this group:

Do those iOS call blocker apps like RoboShield work? I'm not sure which conference sold me out (all of them) but I get 5+ calls a day of nonsense and I'm getting tired of it.

Mine can't resist leaving voice messages.

If you read TFA, you will see that it's about elderly having cognitive problems, not a matter of etiquette.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com