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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

With calls, it's easier: if you get an incoming call with someone is asking you for money, you hang up and call back using the number for that organization that you've found yourself from official sources. Never trust incoming calls when it comes to money.

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This actually depends on who has better SEO. Some scam numbers place higher than the help pages for actual businesses. Receiving physical bills and calling the number on the back of your credit or debit card are good suggestions.

Or, as another poster suggested, competent governments and corporations will use their actual domain name for official communication.

I know that, does my grandmother? In the heat of the moment, will she remember that I told her 2 years ago when they call her?

We've desperately needed secure identity verification for business callers for years, so we can start the decades long process of changing people's instincts about it.

There's no good reason any business should be able to contact me without whoever is calling cryptographically proving they're that business and my phone showing the name and logo from a copy or mirror of an official database.

It should just be a standard part of business registration processes.

But for which country, state, province, or city?

Put in the hierarchical angle, and we're kind of back at domain names.

Which would be a vast improvement over the current system.

Quite literally if the requirement was "your domain name will match your company registration in your jurisdiction" then that would help a lot.

With calls, drop any non-prearranged calls, period.

Over a few years I burned that approach into my parents. It was tough, but worth it.

My mom used to know what to do, but with dementia, she lost that ability. We now have a call block on her landline, so only a small whitelist can get through.

That's a good approach, and I do this too actually, but some people's job or occupation requires them to take calls from unknown numbers. And some people still use landlines without caller ID.

So I call back and get dropped at the top of the phone tree. Now how do I address the original problem?

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