Sorry about that. I agree, also, you’re right that there are ways to make ourselves more resistant to scams - and that message shouldn’t be diluted by my assertion that nobody is completely invulnerable. We can become less vulnerable.
And, of course, even if the population was 99.99% scam proof to your attempts, that still leaves 35,000 people in the US alone to fall for it. Hence the constant blankets of scam attempts to find those people.
It is waaaaay higher than that.
Three of the four people I know who have fallen victim to online or phone scams have fallen victim to multiple scams. Unfortunately one of them is my father. He’s been the target of scams most of my life. He’s a well educated professional, but just incredibly susceptible to flattery. My mother who is a lot less educated has saved him from being scammed many, many more times, and he resents her terribly for it.
I suspect there have been more times than my mother has told me about.
He’s not probably on some kind of sucker list, so he’s getting more targeted attacks.
The other three people I know who have been scammed are not elderly and I don’t think of them as particularly gullible. Though one of them posts about the 2020 election being stolen, Covid being a scam, etc. But I suspect there are tens of millions like her.
I don’t think it is a scam, but I am now getting several messages a day asking me to donate $47 to Kamala. I know that she is rolling in money and I suspect that nothing that she could do in the next ten days is going to matter. The GOTV campaign had better be fully organized by now.
IMHO, the reason that some older folks fall for these scams, is not merely because they are more prone to confusion caused by dementia, etc., but that they were raised as part of a generation that was taught that one must be trusting and polite and cooperate with the rest of society.
My dad is from that generation. The up side of this, is that he’s a mensch; the downside: that he is gullible. He would never expect that someone would ever lie to his face. So he dutifully followed the instructions on his computer screen (the same way he dutifully enlisted, and dutifully obeys speed limit signs) and fell for the malware that said to “call this 800 number”.
He was on the phone for quite some time, with a “service representative” who was ready to take him for as much as they could possibly get–when his wife (my stepmother) walked in and shouted that it was a scam and to terminate all connection with the scammer.
Fortunately, (as I heard after the fact), she stopped my father before any harm could be done–but he was still flabbergasted in disbelief that the rep was fake. He just found it so hard to believe that anyone would lie to him, and would not be who they claimed to be.
I should add that my father attended Harvard and earned a PhD–neither of which helped him in this instance, especially because the people he knew in academia were “such a great bunch of people.”
Does anyone here remember the American reporter who got Ebola during the 2014 outbreak, and was medevac-ed to the U.S. for treatment? Anyway, I followed his Twitter feed for a while, and a couple years later, he was doing some reporting from Nigeria and had one of those scammers offer him $10,000US a month, cash, to go on Skype or FaceTime with him, because people are more likely to fall for it if they see a white person with a Canadian or American accent.
He declined.
Well, to be fair, the offer was probably a scam, too…