Re:Ask HN: How do you protect your parents from tech scammers?
by tialaramex on Thursday January 02, 2020 @01:18PM
(#21938054)
Definitely. But it may be enough depending on your parents, I think for now it's enough for my mother for example. And the title question is "How do you protect your parents?" not "How, hypothetically, should everybody's parents be protected?"
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.
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.