It's not unlike people entering their credentials where they shouldn't. I've worked at a company you know about, where we had an expert in-house phisher. Her best attempt managed to get 50% of credentials... when targeting the security team itself!

So yes, any attack that pulls on the right emotional levers will work on all kinds of people.

My concern is as AI voice/video generation becomes stronger the social engineering can cause internal processes to be circumvented especially if you have a basic understanding of the inner workings of the org.

There were a lot of suspicions that he might be in on the scam, but as near as anyone could determine, he really was just scam victim. He did get disbarred and got a prison sentence of a year or so (IIRC) because while a victim, he also could and should have known better as a notary dealing with an escrow account.

I think elderly are more vulnerable to this, because they get scared and want to help.

My elderly mother fell victim to a "microsoft" and "paypal" technician calling her twice, despite my training her on how not to pick up the phone from these calls and going over how nobody from these companies would ever call her. She got nervous and scared and basically did whatever the scammers told her because she thought something was wrong with her computer.

Now after it's happened twice :she has been reminded not to answer any calls from number she doesn't know. But she still gets nervous she is going to miss something important from health insurance or doctors office so she is still tempted to pick up spam calls.

It's tough, no matter how much I train her she will still want to answer and "help" the scammer. They keep doing this because it works.

I need to just lock her phone down so all callers not in her contact list go to a voicemail I screen. :-/

Next level approach would be to plug in a LLM with voice synthesis and make the scammers waste time and money.

And of course it doesn't require a 100% success rate, they'll call number until hitting a jackpot.

1. Victim suspects scam

2. Victim recognizes the presence of predator.

3. Victim gets scared.

4. Victim tried to maintain composure, but can't think of a way to escape the situation without the predator pursuing.

5. Victim appeases predator because they fear all the terrible things this predator might do, as the predator has no morality and the victim's civilization has collapsed around them.

These predators are violating the deepest social contract. They are acting like brilliant, vicious animals. They deserve to be treated like such, yet they are cloaked in the protection of civilized society. They are a cancer on humanity.

Given all of that, the victims are reacting appropriately.

This is of course a huge problem, because as seen in Uvalde in elsewhere, not only do police have no obligation to help you (which by itself is reasonable of undesirable), but are also empowered to prevent you from helping yourself.

...but you repeat yourself, sir.

It’s not a guarantee for avoiding dementia, but doing heavy cardio regularly before you hit old age might help mitigate it.