I read the entire thing. My point was that mental capacity and acuity (including the ability to resist panic scamming) go down especially after 80, and gullibility goes up. No matter how smart you were prior. And that this is a vulnerability for everyone. In 2023, Americans aged 60 and older reported losses exceeding $3.4 billion due to scams, marking an 11% increase from the previous year. The median loss in a romance scam for ages 70 and older is $9,000. And now there's also pig-butchering. When combined with isolation and a lack of digital literacy, everyone's older family members are vulnerable.
And my point is that coming up with ways for a fully calm, collected, reasonable person to detect a scammer is a waste of time, because that’s the easy part. The hard part is being calm, collected, and reasonable enough to actually consider that you might be getting scammed.
And that is hard. For most people, extremely hard. For people who lived most of their lives before the era of cheap and fast worldwide communication, it’s even worse. For people with declining mental abilities, it’s worse yet. Saying “oh you can expose the scam just by saying you’ll call them back” is looking at the wrong thing.
So yeah, you’re making a great point that meshes well with my own and definitely does not deserve to be wrapped in snideness.
ah. ok. I apologize for misinterpreting. You're saying that because these scams use irrational techniques, there is no point to expecting "reasonableness" to work?
Exactly. Scam protection needs to focus on staying calm and being open to the possibility of a scam. Once you’re in a good mental state and the thought has occurred, “hey, this might be a scam,” then you’ve basically already won. Finding a question that can authenticate the purported family member is trivial by comparison.
