You'll sit down to talk to your parents someday and the damage will already be done.

The scammers are fast. They are good. They are like vultures hovering over the elderly. Our parents don't see this stuff coming, and they comply too quickly.

My wife administers a nursing home and this is a daily problem. Their residents get calls from scammers constantly and they have to stop little old men and women from walking out of the building to catch a bus to go to the bank to send money to one scammer after another.

They are always telling them, no, the medicare office does not want you to put all your money in a government bank account for them to make deposits to - those are scammer accounts. No, a nephew you never heard about does NOT need to be bailed out of jail. No, you do not have to buy a pre-paid visa card over the phone in order to pay for medications. No, you never have to purchase a coupon for $50 that will save you $100 at the store, those don't exist. It goes on and on and on and on.

My mother phoned me because her laptop was yelling at her. Bad guys had taken over her browser (IE maybe? Or Edge? I genuinely don't remember) and on start-up it was repeating a verbal message on maximum volume about how they now controlled her computer and she needed to call them to... well you know how these go.

But she had the sense to realise that even though it said she must call _them_ she could rather call _me_ and since it was yelling at her she put the laptop down and left it yelling into thin air. I walked her through the surprisingly easy process to disable it and get her back in her comfort zone. I explained what they'd tried to achieve, that they had tried to trick her into thinking they were more powerful than they really were - and praised her for taking the time to call me.

Unfortunately, because it had happened so quickly he didn't remember everything the scammer had asked him to do. So it took quite a bit of searching until we figured it out.

a lot of the situations you described are targeted at people with dementia and other neurological disorders. there really isn't anything you can do in those cases.

thankfully my parent have their wits and don't suffer from such disorders.

This… seems a bit naive to think your parents will call you first every single time they want to do something special with their computer. It makes me think of parents that assume their teenagers aren't doing anything stupid because they are confident the kids are sharing everything with them.

Anectode: My in-laws are renting their property through Internet. They occasionally receive calls by interested renters and they successfully manage it by themselves. They are almost in their 70's. One day someone had a payment issue and asked to pay them differently, asking for account information so they could send the money directly. They managed to trick them into putting their card number on a fake website displaying the agreed-upon amount. They lost about 100€, the bank couldn't revert the transaction for some reason.

Parents only call you when they are unsure of something. The problem is when the scammer manage to convince them everything is normal, which is exactly what they are good at.

I know you said 100€, but I do not belive a bank will make the claim. I was in that situation twice, the first time they did not even mention it, and the other time they did mention it. When I asked "and so what" they said that they just informed me of that but they they will, of course, not make the claim.

> if you think it's naive for your users or loved ones to call you when they have the slightness doubt about something...

I think you just affirmed their point. You're acknowledging they only call when they have even the slightest doubt. They're saying that is exactly the problem, because they won't call when they have no doubt that everything is normal.

In 2020, does this mean anything online anymore? Or does it mean more than ever? I've gotten to the point where a -50 karma is just a momentary annoyance, and I just think of it as "imaginary Internet points."

I could see how a kid who was conditioned to see their self-value in karma or views might take it hard. I've certainly been in that boat. Has there been a peak, then decline in online social media cynicism, like there was with child computer literacy? (Went up, peaked, then went down.) (Thankfully, my parents have always been extreme social media cynics.)

At the end, I tell them that if something just feels off, even if they can't figure out why, I'd rather they call or message me on Slack than ignore it. It absolutely never bothers me when they do it - in fact, it makes me feel better. Maybe 1% of reports are actual issues, but I'd rather deal with 99% false positives than miss even one thing.

If you are at a FAANG, then the phish success rate against your company is probably in the mid single digit percentages.

If you’re at a Fortune 50 company, then the phish success rate against your company is most likely in the high single digit percentage range — if you’re lucky.

If you’re at a company not big enough to be in the Fortune 50, then the phish success rate at your company is most likely in the double digit percentage range. That’s right, over 10% of all phishing messages sent to people in your company will end up hooking their targets.

And the sad thing is that we techies are the ones that are supposed to be most aware of these things and most likely to be able to protect against them.

A friends parent got done by a phone scam. "Your router has been compromised, please let us check your PC, oh no they've got the computer, install this. Oh no - they've hacked your bank account and used it to Launder money, the fraud office will contact you. etc etc. The bank saved them when they tried to move a second load of money.

I don't believe for a moment they didn't contact anyone because of a fear of being laughed at - they believed the narrative that this was a secret operation. Ironically it had all the hallmarks of a classic eve online scam.

Do not assume all scammers are mediocre and transparent. Do not assume a close personal relationship is enough.

My parents ring me if they get an odd popup on a webpage to double check if they should ignore it or not. If someone calls them telling them there's something wrong they politely tell the person they will ask me to look at it and politely end the call. And if they purchase stuff off a new website they check with me before they make any purchase so they don't pass their credit card to a dodgy site.

It's better they call and ask me than take a risk, last thing I want to happen is my parents to fall victim to a scam.

What if the scammer plot "do not call your kids" into their scheme?

and that really goes for _ANY_ situation in life. if you are told _not_ to talk to someone else about a situation, you are being controlled and taken advantage of.