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.
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
Codeword/phrase
Depends on how the scammers reach your grandparents. SMS filtering may be enough.
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.
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.
Set transaction limits on their cards
What I’ve gone with is “don’t believe anything you hear over the phone, wait for us in person”. I don’t think they understood.
That is the best tip by far.
Unfortunately you can’t protect your grandparents if you’re not around the 24/7
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.
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…
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
honestly it’s a smart move; you’ll be saving yourself the time since you can’t squeeze blood from this stone. lol
Have a safeword with your grandparents. If anyone claims to be you, they have to know the safeword.
Aside, this isnt new, and doesnt require AI. You dont need to do fancy voice matching or anything special, just claim that the phone connection is bad.
The problem with this is that they would have to be suspicious in the first place to ask for it. If they are already suspicious then the scam will likely fail anyway, they tend to only really work when the assumption of who they are exists and they get that by raising stress levels by claiming some kind of emergency.
“Grandma, there are lots of scammers around, if anyone calls and claims to be me, ask for the password”
Yes, it only works if we also appropriately educate our at risk family members and instill a healthy level of caution. But if we aren’t willing to do that, then there is nothing that can be done.
Have luddite grandparents who would refuse to pay their taxes with anything but a handwritten check on general principle, and who wouldn’t have been able to work a Bitcoin ATM even if you were right there with them literally pointing at things and telling them what to do.
It also helps that they’re dead.
My parents are getting up in their years though. My mom’s still sharp as a tack and decently good with tech. She doesn’t exactly fully understand AI, but she’s aware of it and has a general ideas of what it can do, so I’m pretty confident her bullshit detectors can fill in the gaps from there.
And my dad… well he has my mom around. Probably about 20 years ago he was just about ready to give information to some scammer claiming to be from Apple tech support
Despite the fact that we owned no apple products.
It also helps that they’re dead
Not a UNIVERSALLY helpful thing, though…
