Hacker News Reader

Comment by aenis | Hacker News Reader

The advice I gave to my folks -- hard ignore any contact attempts not initiated by them. Dont read, dont answer the phone except from recognized numbers. I think thats the only way. No legitimate businesses call or text people out of the blue these days.

I dont believe in AI voice assistants picking up phones and filtering scammers. Those tbings will fight a losing game considering how the mainstream LLMs are built.

View on HN

It would be great if not for the fact that at least over here in the UK your doctor or anyone from the NHS will always call you from a restricted number. So especially if you're elderly and have regular check ups or anything medical going on, the advice to "only answer known numbers" falls apart. And in my experience NHS receptionists have zero patience for the whole "tell me why you're calling" automated screens too, they just disconnect straight away.

Yeah, I think thats a valid edge case - and a manageable one. If you are expecting a call from a doctor, lift the firewall for a while.

It gets a bit more complicated than that. I don't even regularly need things from my doctor, but I have a referral to a specialist right now, and the waiting time is around 16 months to be contacted by them. At that time they will randomly call me from a restricted number. So I must have all call screening and blocking off for probably 2 years in order to accommodate this. And I can't time it because in the past I was referred to a different one and they contacted me in only 4 months when they said 12+.

Had similar situation here in the US -- though with a more tolerable delay -- with a private health care provider.

The fix of course is an enforced requirement from higher authority that health care providers communicate only by means that prove identity of the source -- never calling from an unverifiable number.

How to make that happen, though ... ?

This doesn’t work for older folks. They have medical providers constantly randomly reaching out. Typically medication changes or reminding them it’s time to come do labs or whatever.

That and trying to walk my parents through turning this sort of thing on already was a 3 hour long process. That they will in no way remember even with a checklist.

There is unlikely going to be a technical way to solve this social problem, as is usually the case.

Personal assistants in the Philippines and hope they don’t scam you themselves

Legitimate actors perusing poor security policies is actually the biggest threat vector.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com