Tell them to spend all their money. the health insurance corporations will take it all anyways
Establish a specific trusted channel of communication and a backup. Anything important must come through those instead of just any random source. Educate them on scams in general and if they aren’t on social media already, keep them away from it.
Especially if cognitive decline hasn’t set in yet, also encourage them to make healthier lifestyle choices, take preventative measures, get checked up, and perhaps even get hearing aids to keep their minds sharp for some more years.
I’ve personally provided them a locked-down device that only connects to my aforementioned trusted communication channels.
Cooperation is the secret.
If anyone thinks about trying something, setup a private meeting with them.
I’ve heard that quiet publication of the results of that meeting (whatever you choose to make those results) can be a great deterrent to others with similar ideas.
Don’t upload photos/videos/voice recordings of yourself to the internet, ever. This alone won’t guarantee your likeness and voice can’t be replicated with AI since there could always be photos/videos/voice recordings of you out there that you’re not aware of (from a data leak, etc) but it will significantly reduce your attack surface. Unless you’re rich or otherwise high profile, scammers are most likely not targeting you specifically but just scraping the internet for training data and picking targets based on who they have the most video/audio of and can therefore produce the most convincing AI fakes of. Or buying from data brokers who have scraped the internet for them. I could be wrong, but I doubt there are many scammers going to the effort of buying/stealing, say, call recordings from your phone company or virtual meeting provider to scam some random person without much wealth.
Oh, and never link to your IRL friends and family online. Never add them on Facebook (just never use Facebook tbh), or Discord, or anywhere else that’s not E2EE. Scammers can’t target your grandparents if they have no idea who they even are.
Parents. Mine are fairy savvy about scammers, but crucially are mostly offline and already distrust cold callers. The answer is you get power of attorney for if they lose their marbles.
Power of attorney really does not help at all.
Power of attorney is granted to allow you to do stuff they want for them as if you were them. It does not allow you to override their clearly-expressed will.
To override their will you would need a guardianship which (at least in the US) you are not going to get until they are quite far gone with dementia.
TL;DR at least in the USA your parents have a legally-protected right to be as stupid as they want and you can’t use the legal system to stop them
Depends on how the scammers reach your grandparents. SMS filtering may be enough.
Codeword/phrase
As far as financial scams go, my parents and uncles handled my grandparents’ finances for their last decade. If they were targeted then there would be an upper limit to how much money they could lose in one scam. They also weren’t paying for things online.
As for younger elderly people, if they’re still smart enough for it then I’d try educating them. Practically, not just talking about it. There are plenty of good public interactive resources for phishing training, so I’d be surprised if there weren’t any for AI. Also simple things like “never pay for anything in gift cards, ever” are some easy wins.
Throw away their phones, bolt down the front door.
Better yet, bury them to just make sure no one can reach them
On a serious note though: keep telling them, over and over, never to trust anything or anyone. They hear your voice over the phone unexpectedly? Ask for a code word that only the two of you know. No code word? AI scammer. Don’t trust any email you didn’t request yourself, always verify the sender that it’s the right email address. Never trust any SMS messages . Banks don’t ever call you.
Then also remember that in the end they’ll probably fail here and there because good scams are extremely hard to detect and avoid.
I tried to setup a code with my parents and neither remembers. They come up with it and then forget. They forget not only the code but that we decided to have a code…
Perhaps you should instead have them ask you about some obscure family lore
Set transaction limits on their cards
Unfortunately you can’t protect your grandparents if you’re not around the 24/7
Don’t believe anything you hear over the phone, wait for us in person is what I’ve gone with. I don’t think they understood.
That is the best tip by far.
It depends on how mentally there they are. If they are, go through anti-scam strategies and make sure they have family to bounce questions off of.
If dementia is forming, you should probably have a frank family conversation with how to handle someone who is no longer fully there.
i sometimes worry when i’ll pass the threshold of cognitive decline such that these scammers will be able to get anything from me; but then i remember that i have no assets/savings for them to take from me and that i’ll very likely follow in my parent’s & grandparent’s foot steps and be dead before i reach 70 years old y se me pasa.
Fair enough. I’ve removed you from my call list
Rob them yourself.
Jokes aside: they are mostly dead so pretty safe no one takes anything from them. One still lives but doesn’t use anything but the phone. Once shouted at a poor lady calling her because she thought it’d be a scam ^^ pretty safe but you can never be safe enough of course
