Google site:bogleheads.org elderly scams - the list goes on and on ...

I've also got elderly relatives, and even with their pensions secure (European-style pension system), there's lots of people going after their money. Trying to prepare them for encounters with online and real world scammers is an ongoing process, e.g. by recounting the cases that I read in the news to foster mistrust.

I've lost count how often an elderly family member (who is still sharp as a tack fortunately) told me that the "police", "your beloved niece", or "Microsoft" called them.

>>I've lost count how often an elderly family member (who is still sharp as a tack fortunately) told me that the "police", "your beloved niece", or "Microsoft" called them.

It's very sobering when we realize that we too will one day be just like them.

Right now my default reaction to phone call from unknown number is to ignore it instead of picking it up. Hopefully this will stay with me as I get older.

(my parents are notably different in this default)

Caller IDs can be easily spoofed. For example, you may receive a call from what appears to be your bank's fraud department. The person on the other side of the line may warn you of some (fake) suspicious activity and "send you" a one-time security code to verify your identity. In reality, the scammer has already gained access to your email account and is now trying to log onto your bank account, for which they need the one-time code.

There is an existing scam that goes something like that. I probably got some of the details wrong.

Bottom line: do not trust any incoming calls.

I'm like your parent commenter and I would expand on what they call "unknown number".

I don't take calls from "unknown or unexpected caller id". I had someone call me recently that I was actually expecting to call me. But their caller id had their personal name instead of the company I expected it from so I didn't take it. They can leave a message. And they did.

If "my bank" calls me but I don't expect it, the caller id can have my bank's name all it wants. They can leave a message and I'll call them back at a number I find on my card / online.

What might work is if I was expecting my bank to call me and then a scammer calls me with bank caller id. But they'd also need to know what it's about. I've also found that if you're already in contact with large companies and they call you back they very much don't user caller id at all. All their outbound calls say "unknown number". Had this while troubleshooting a phone number transfer.

If I do expect a call from an unknown number and thus take them, I still don't take phone calls with my name. I say things like "Hello". That's it. Then they many times ask "Is this so and so" without explaining who they are, which I find pretty rude and dumb. So my answer to that is: "The question is who you are and what you want". I've had many encounters where the answer from them then makes it clear they are legitimate and they probably thought I was rude but I'd rather be rude than out of my savings. Training for when I'm 80.

by "unknown numbers", I mean "not at my address book", which is pretty small. So this excludes my bank's security department - why would it be there?

And if scammer spoofs my friend's number, I should be able to recognize it's not my friend, or at least understand thar my friend won't need my bank code.

(Sadly modern phones don't make it easy to tell if the label is from your address book or from external syatem. Adding personal prefixes to end of names, like "John (from NY2020 party)" helps a lot with this.)

It won't be phone calls. We don't trust them. Our parents / grandparents did.

It might be a brain interface pushing intrusive thoughts. Our grandkids will quietly ignore these thoughts like zen masters because they recognized spam. It might be a perfect video chat from your spouse, all spoofed by AI. People will adapt but not us because it'll be new and emerging when we're already crystalized in our patterns.

We will become the vulnerable generation somehow.

My mother bought a house in a retirement village decades ago. A few years ago she had her land line disconnected. The reason is on weekends she was getting 20 or so scam calls a day. I asked around, and everyone in the village was getting these calls. But if you went a block outside of the village it all stopped. The scammers had identified the range of phone numbers used by land lines in the village, and rang them non-stop, for months on end.

Except increasingly many elderly don't have children / relatives to pass power of attorney to. A bit of a tangent but there is a market opening for a national scale business that is a trustworthy end of life management service for people who are going to die alone. That is going to be a huge market if demographic trends are any indication.

Local attorneys / solicitors already provide such services but one has no way of knowing whether they are trustworthy or will remain trustworthy (think Lionel Hutz from the Simpsons) whereas a larger scale business can afford to do internal auditing and integrity checks and make them public to ensure trustworthiness. A large enough scale business can also afford to maintain specialists on hand to handle things like managing online social media accounts that a local operation wouldn't be able to afford.

Sure. But in our society that “trustworthy end-of-life management service” is going to realize that it can achieve better returns by abusing seniors’ finances (or else lookalike services will pop up.) This is the pattern with most debt management companies: they take vulnerable people and upsell them on high-interest consolidation loans.

You either need strong societal values that can stop this (and a business structure that keeps reasonable people in control) or a government that legislates to stop it. We currently have neither in the US, which is one of the reasons we’re in this jam.

Firstly, is that worse than letting individual scammers prey on the elderly which is what is happening now? Authorities already can't keep up with finding and prosecuting each of these individual cases. For an institution, there's at least some small hope of scrutiny and eventual accountability for crimes.

Secondly, there can be institutions that are trustworthy enough. There are nationwide scale banks in the US that I could name that have an unsavory past reputation but there are also ones I could name that don't. It's not impossible to make an end of life management business that the public can feel safe in hiring.

I am simply pointing out a risk. Everything you do to make things better can be corrupted, and you need to take enormous steps in advance to counteract that.

Surely the government provides that? In my country it does. Those children EPOAs can also choose to give up their responsibility and the government will appoint a professional. It's not hard to just basically avoid hemorrhaging money.