The lesson is, someone call tell you there IS a problem on the phone, but don't trust ANYTHING else, not even the description of the problem.
The absolute only thing they're allowed to tell you is that you need to visit your banking provider tomorrow, not some other bank but your own bank, with only family, and ask what the actual problem is.
My father suffers from vascular dementia. He's pretty agreeable these days (a lot more so than he used to be). Fortunately an underlying suspicion of strangers calling to talk about money on the telephone has triumphed thus far, but I do expect that this balance will change over time.
[0] https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/social-isolation-loneliness-old...
Instead lookup the fraud/accounts contact number for the bank and call them yourself. - aka start the interaction with known good information
The telco's themselves should be held legally responsible for the fraud in these cases.
If I hang up a phone, I expect that to be the end of it, period. Yes, that includes landlines.
Unless you know exactly what you're doing, what you should do in the case of any over-the-phone problem like that, is first contact someone you trust and knows what they're doing. Your own bank, an expert of your choosing (and not chosen by the stranger on the phone), or a knowledgeable friend or family member.
Never trust the stranger on the phone.
My grandmother started developing dementia about three years ago. What is really disturbing, is that the scammers somehow figured it out about a year before her symptoms started really presenting themselves. It eventually got to the point where they were calling and asking for her by name several times a month.
She has a fairly large retirement fund, and I think they may be try to get access to it specifically. I am horrified at how sophisticated these operations have become. When they had her on the phone, they must have asked her lots of questions that they used to make a dossier of her, and have been passing this dossier from scam agency to agency. It is clearly a call center calling her, and I have experimented with them. I ask them to call back, and they asked when would be a good time to call back. And then a different person returns the call, clearly reading from a script and already knowing personal information about her.
One thing I am concerned about is that they are simply pumping her for information, so that they can impersonate her and try to initiate a money transfer directly with the bank.
It is so disturbing that there are people out there who know who my grandmother is, and are trying to take advantage of her.
Really all they need to learn is that gift cards are not payment. Also the sites that allow gift card reselling need to be held a little accountable too. If someone is going on there and listing thousands of dollars of gift cards that should be a huge red flag.
There are legitimate reasons for doing this. Buying gift cards using a rewards-earning credit card and reselling them online is a great way to rack up airline/hotel points if the gift card can be sold for anything close enough to face value.
This is why lists of "elderly owned" phone numbers go for so much on the black/gray market. The cost of running these scams is so low that they spam everyone with their bait, but I suspect the real cash cows are elderly people who have large savings / Social Security checks.
Part of the problem is that it is super difficult to teach a parent or grandparent what inspect element even is without delving deep into Web infrastructure and how browsers work...very complicated, technical explanations. Simplification works to a point, but if you just tell them "don't trust what you see on the screen" they'll ignore actually important warnings, blast through alert boxes faster than they can read them, and when your next lesson includes "look for the green padlock next to each address" they'll just get even more confused since, you know, you just told them not to trust anything.