Comment by animex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by animex | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Cognitive decline plays a big role in the susceptibility of elderly folks.

An uncle of mine was a notoriously a ruthless businessman in his heyday and he fell prey to a gift-card scam where he was kept on the phone for 8 hours straight while he did their bidding. We were all shocked he fell for this but then realized the techniques that they use prey upon individuals with inability to deal with stress or trigger anxiety/panic causing them to act irrationally.

As I age, I've noticed similar declines in ability to deal with multiple tasks, stress, etc.

A better defence is to reduce the attack surface. While, I have legal financial control over mom's estate, suffering from moderate dementia, I've removed her ability to interact with her finances by removing her check book (she had loaned a large sum to an acquaintance without informing us), lowering her credit card limits, removed access to online banking, maintaining a low-balance checking account. All her expenses are on autopay. She doesn't even think about her finances anymore. Whenever she gets telemarketers, she always says "you have to talk to my son". Once in a blue moon she asks me "do I have money? I don't even know" -- and I reassure her she doesn't have to worry about money.

I've done the same -- 2factor, using disposable credit card numbers, maintaining a separate PayPal-linked bank account separate from my main account etc, text notifications on all transactions etc.

The sophistication and technology being used is also becoming problematic in detecting these scenarios even for highly aware/technical folk.

> The sophistication and technology being used is also becoming problematic in detecting these scenarios even for highly aware/technical folk.

This kind of worries me too, but I think we can still defend almost 100% by just following rule #1:

“Do not send money in response to anyone contacting you unsolicited, either over the phone, email, SMS, social media, etc.”

You can get a lot of mileage from just that. There is never a case where such contact is not a scam or spam. If it’s someone you know or already do business with, use rule #2: hang up, wait an hour, and call them back using a number you know to be correct.

>There is never a case where such contact is not a scam or spam.

Bail?

I edited my comment to clarify Rule #2: hang up, wait some time, then call back on the known correct number.

If they're in jail, that's not going to work.

You can lookup the number of the jail they are supposedly in.

There was a scam attempt against me that spoofed the caller-id to look like the county sheriff; scammer would not agree to me calling them back on that (or any other) number for the sheriff.

Um, yes it will?

You pay the court clerk [1]. You either pay in person, or possibly online depending on the jurisdiction. If you aren't paying in person, you'll need to contact them directly anyway, and their contact info should be easy to verify. It's not like they're going to be sitting next to the detained party on the phone with a bitcoin deposit address.

1. https://legalaidnyc.org/get-help/bail-incarceration/what-you...

Except then your "friend" will say they are traveling and they lost their phone (or it was stolen) and they have borrowed a phone from a friend, so you don't have a known good number to call them back.

In which case still call them back at the number you know is good. If they answer, you know the thing was a scam. If they don't answer, you don't know. Call known numbers of friends and family of the "victim" to find out if they really are traveling. This is not definitive, because the scammers might have called those people too.

I think the key to these situations is to ask questions of the "victim" that only the real person would know the answers to. They need to be questions about shared experiences that would not have appeared on social media. If they try to blow you off like "I'm under too much stress to think about such things right now!" hang up.

Also, consider asking your friends to let you know before they travel, and arrange with them a pass phrase they can say if they contact you for an emergency. Maybe a duress pass phrase too such that if they say it, you'll know they're in real trouble. Is this a pain? Is it too much to ask of many people? Yes and yes. But this is the world we're in now until we decide to start putting scammers in prison for long sentences.

I've tried to establish simple language codes with close relatives to deal with such scenarios, but I don't think I could rely on them remembering those. It's just such an awfully awkward conversation to be having that I suspect most people like to forget about it quickly. Any experiences with this or tips?

You don't need that. If you know someone just ask them something trivial like "Where did we last see each other?"

As someone trying to initiate new business over the phone as an insurance producer this is both reasonable and worrisome. As someone who isn't trying to scam anyone it concerns me that scams are so pervasive this may continue to be incredibly difficult by less legitimate actors.

I'm experiencing difficulties in even contact people who have expressed interest because they have expressed a broader interest than me eg they expressed an interest in foo and are now getting contacted by bar who has a relationship with foo but is not in fact foo and the contact could have occurred weeks ago.

I could stand up a website and plaster it with verifiable information but much of that info like say professional license is itself by dint of being public not entirely verifiable eg I could put up a website for Sam Spade with his license info. For the same reason you are able to verify his license number—its public—its not an actual verification that you are speaking to the right person.

Perhaps more relevant its easy to just never get to speak to the person in the first place because their defenses are rightfully up.

I wish there was an easier way to authenticate as legit.

I think in this case, it counts as spam rather than a scam, which is why I mentioned both.

If you click a link, fill out a web form, send in a physical letter, or make a phone call and effectively say I want to get info on <product> and the company gives your name to an affiliate who is a licensed professional to try to sell you <product> I don't think it counts as spam either.

I wish your phone had a standardized way to link your expressed intent, the nature of the caller, and official nature/licensing or professional affiliation and show this data on your phone during receipt or during call kind of like you can click on an icon and get information about the legitimacy of a website.

EG when you express the interest in <product> a singular number is created on your end and carried through to anyone who is actually acting such request whether it was asking someone to fix your cable or sell you life insurance and you could then verifiably see beyond caller idea and absolutely verifiable and relevant info in order to ascertain more data than is available via caller ID

On September 2nd 2005 you told comcast their bad equipment was making you consider rage stomping said equipment. You are receiving a phone call from agent 34534 in the <country> who is officially employed by Comcast domain: xfinity.com to handle tech support regarding this issue. OR

On December 10th 2012 you requested information re: life insurance from <Company>. You are receiving a call from <agent> who is a licensed insurance producer license #asdfasdf who has been an insurance producer for n years and has zero complaints regarding this request.

It would be great if you could even address this request online via some standard like canceling it so nobody bugs you or attaching metadata

If someone fills out a web form looking for quotes, and that form pushes them into entering their phone number, and you use that number to call them instead of responding with an emailed quote, that is most certainly spam.

Insofar as I'm aware they literally expected to be contacted by a person. The majority haven't provided an email nor sufficient information that would allow anyone to reasonably provide anything beyond a table of values that they may or may not qualify for.

I'd love to collect my own data and converse over email. I would be overjoyed in fact but I don't think people will put their personal medical history in a web page that isn't their doctors and I don't really blame them.

My experience is the consumer side of home/auto/moving/storage with web pages promising online quotes, but are actually just leadgen funnels that hand off phone numbers to traditional high-touch sales processes. I'm sure the sales reps that receive those lists believe the targets actually want to be called, but that's obviously a convenient fiction with the way the web pages are set up.

I've also gotten spam calls that are similar leadgen funnels, where the frontend is obviously robocall spam, and then you're transferred to sales reps at what is likely a different company who clearly expect to be speaking to bona fide interested customers rather than perturbed spam victims just looking to mess with them.

In general I've got to question the impedance mismatch of turning a web form into a phone call regardless of whether it's necessary. To me they're much different head spaces, and just because evening/night me is preliminarily looking into a topic doesn't necessarily mean that daytime me wanted to add it to the in-process run queue. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of your rejection is based on this dynamic where people wanted the interaction/information at the time they requested it, but not later when you're interrupting them doing something else.

Thanks for the feedback. I think the process of buying some products is inherently difficult because the space is very fragmented and there really isn't a lot of incentive to streamline the process.

This is a good way to think about it. While I might be interested in the product, I’m not interested in the “high touch” sales experience, nor am I interested in doing it on someone else’s schedule. Those aspects of the process are the spam.

There is a risk associated with not wireing money never ever. Your brother could very well need 100usd for gas to some strangers phone wallet, since he lost his phone and wallet, etc. If he is in some foreign nation not sending money could very well make him end up on the streets.

I would have been screwed like two times in my life if I couldn't solve stuff like this.

I think the limit should just be how much you send.

> I have legal financial control over mom's estate

A note to anyone in Canada reading this: This would be considered a bare trust and it would have to be declared to the CRA, starting this year.

And it requires a different return that needs to be filed a month earlier.

Setting the phone to not ring for unknown numbers is also powerful, but to make it work best you need a way to be able to "add" numbers remotely.

I wish it was more intelligent; I'd love to tell it what area codes to permit; the advantage of having a phone from half way around the country is that I only care about a few area codes and the scammers don't know which ones those are.

Sadly, area codes are no longer a meaningful signal of anything. My family has three cell phones and one VOIP number; and those use four different area codes, hundreds of miles apart.

It's a signal that a call is a scam - 99.99999% of calls to me from the area code of my phone number (and surrounding area codes) are worthless scam calls, because of https://xkcd.com/1129/

I'd love to ignore all calls from unknown numbers EXCEPT the actual area code I reside in, which they don't know. Then calls from schools, doctors, etc might actually get through.

As it is, those go to voicemail and I get them eventually.

His year is off -- my area code is where I lived in 2002-03 and specifically not in 2005, but yeah. I blocked all that area code except for a couple specific numbers.

WideProtect on iOS can get you most of the way there: "block all phone numbers in the following area codes except those in my contacts book"

I regularly get scam calls that spoof my area code.

Hell, my number is even commonly spoofed! Every few months, I get a call from someone, then I get to explain to them that scammers can spoof phone numbers.

I got threatened with violence, while I was watching my first born child sleep, hours after her birth, by someone who was convinced I'd spent the previous hours repeatedly calling his girlfriend.

He was not willing to listen to reason.

I thought that would work for me, and I got a local number before moving across the country. Somehow I’m getting spam calls from where I actually live now, and not from my phone’s area code. No idea how that happens. I haven’t gotten a single spam call from the area code.

The US rule that disconnects phone providers without authentication for phone numbers isn’t active yet.

You misunderstand.

I have a Wyoming area code. There are less than a million of those in circulation. I haven't lived in Wyoming in years, so the odds that a call with a Wyoming area code is both a) not already in my contacts and b) legitimate, is basically zero. So I let every single (307) call go to voicemail, and if they leave a message at all, I listen to it (and 99 times out of 100 discover that its a failed robocall. That 1 time, its an authentic wrong number, and I've called a few back if it sounded like something they were expecting to hear back about).

> We were all shocked he fell for this but then realized the techniques that they use prey upon individuals with inability to deal with stress or trigger anxiety/panic causing them to act irrationally.

It's a good thing politicians and politcal propaganda outlets don't make use of this. :/

What I worry about is that some jerk with a model of my voice has been helping my parents through this process for the last couple of years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com