Yeah the “scamming elderly people out of everything the own” industry is booming.
Just scrape all of a family’s public facing data and feed it in to a soulkiller algo then turn it against meemaw to steal her retirement.
The scams are insane, there are so many and they’re all good at convincing elderly people who are used to cold calls and call center talk.
Several people in my family have been hit and none of them are even that senile. They just got played for months before they actually executed the scam.
Worst one is they buy up helplines that are printed on old tech so when you call the “official” HP helpline on your decade old printer you get scammers pretending to be HP
I fucking despise this society.
I’m sure if I talked about how this technology is evil, and should be banned. I’ll have hordes of smuglords telling me that actually, scammers are sneaky geniuses that should be praised for outsmarting people.
Or we could…oh I don’t know. Not reward being a conniving snake?
First opsec tip: don’t use yourself on the online face swap ai, for neither the source picture nor the target video.
my family has a safe word that we have discussed only in a room with no electronics
Becoming fucking cold war spy to exist in the world
my family has a safe word that we have discussed only in a room with no electronics
Just like in the cyberpunkerinos!
Nigerian prince“Hey, it’s Jimmy your nephew… What? You don’t know who I am?! I’m JImmy! Your nephew! Anyways - I’m in a real jam. Could you lend me some money right away?”
My grandmother got hit with one of these and lost $800. She claimed the person sounded exactly like me. My grandpa then got hit by the same scammer trying to double dip, but he was savvy enough to record the call. My grandma recognized the voice saying “Oh, listen! It sounds just like you!”
And it was a gruff, scratchy voice that had a Southeast Asian accent (I do not sound like that)
I think the idea is they can take the face of a known relative and do an impersonation of them. If the mark is moderately senile, it could work.
My point was that the scammer could also go on a pure fishing expedition. And it was easy to do that as a joke.
jimmy jam
I’m going to start getting video calls from biological relatives that I’ve disowned for years telling me I need to send them money any day now, huh?
Everyone should talk to their relatives, especially elderly relatives about scams. The most important points are:
That they should never trust that the person calling is who they say they are, they can always hang up, look up the number and call the company/police/whoever directly. Also talk about how scammers create a false sense of urgency. Lastly, talk about the ways scammers collect their money, by having you send venmo/Apple pay/Zelle, gift cards or crypto atms, nobody legitimate requires that kind of payment.
It’s a hard thing to talk about without making them feel like you’re calling them dumb or gullible. The way I broached it with my mom was to tell her about someone smart I knew that got tricked by one of those tech support scams.
Nothing guarantees you won’t get tricked into a scam, but you can make it harder
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