'She Hooked Me': How an Online Scam Cost a Senior Citizen His Life's Savings | Hacker News Reader

'She Hooked Me': How an Online Scam Cost a Senior Citizen His Life's Savings

wsj.com

16 pointswallflower12 comments

The bank warned him of scams, but he ignored them. I wonder - is there a way for banks to warn people of scams that they will listen to?

First hand experience with this with an elderly parent. There is not. As long as the person has agency and isn’t under a guardianship or conservatorship, they are free to convey their income and assets until they exhaust them. Some people are, for lack of a better term, financially irrational (and some people pass through this phase but it is not static).

It’s also an example of why unrestricted UBI alone isn’t a solution, and systems like Medicare and Social Security are important: even if you fuck up so bad you lose everything, you still have something to provide for you until death. Hard to take the monkey/lizard brain out of the human. Importantly, have to keep iterating and improving relevant systems while aggressively pursuing the threat actors in question.

Interesting. I wonder if we'll see more of these with LLMs and Deepfakes in the future. It doesn't look that hard to duplicate the process. There's plenty of training text out there of people telling other people what they want to hear. And finding pictures of attractive women for training the Deepfake isn't hard either.

Is this a wealth transfer from stupid to smart, or is it actually possible to scam people with and above normal intelligence?

It’s a wealth transfer from the emotionally vulnerable to criminals.

> Scammers specifically seek out the lonely—people living regular lives consisting of doctor’s visits, frozen food and errands. They lure them with the prospect of an exciting life that would otherwise seem out of reach.

Being smart isn't a requirement to be a scammer. Many of them are just working off of scripts that someone much more intelligent and manipulative put together for them to use.

Being stupid also isn't necessarily a requirement for being scammed. If you can catch someone off guard or take advantage of an emotional vulnerability as in this case, you can exploit them.

It's not smarts:

I gave a phishing training and just an hour later I almost clicked on a phishing link.

Made me reevaluate a lot of things.

Cory Doctorow is smarter than I and got scammed. https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swi...

With the elderly, dementia has a lot to do with it.

I just saw a YouTube video peddling 'supplement for men' aimed towards men 16-30 (anybody older ought to have his life a bit more figured out), got to the website to check how much of a scam it is, and it was probably one of the biggest scam I ever saw. Typically the type of scam science my mother fell into times and times again, and that I though would only work on hippy women. This sexist bias I had is now dead, but i'm not reassured.

I'm not saying young people don't fall for scams. But dealing with a 91 year old mother now, I know how vulnerable old people are. And some people start having signs of dementia in their 70s like the man in this WSJ article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com