Protecting Older Adults from Phone, Text, and Email Scams

Something doesn’t quite feel right about this message.

It’s the instinct you have but may not trust, and these days threats often arrive in three common ways. Here’s what each one actually looks like, why it works, and what we do about it. This is one corner of the technical support side of what we do.

On the phone

The scam doesn’t work because she’s gullible. It works because she’s polite.

The people this happens to are rarely the ones you’d guess. Scammers aren’t hunting for confusion. They’re hunting for good manners and the personal values that say you don’t hang up on someone that sounds genuinely official, upset, or in trouble. Your mother spent seventy years learning to be gracious on the phone. That’s the gap they slip through.

Last year, Americans over 60 reported $7.7 billion in losses to fraud. Fake tech support took more than a billion of it, and nearly every version of it ends with them getting on the phone.

She calls me after an instinct and walks me back through it. Not what the man said, but what she noticed. How fast he was talking, why it had to be settled today, and the part she can’t name except to say something doesn’t quite feel right about this message. Developing and trusting that instinct is how she defends herself. My job is to help her trust it the first time she feels it instead of the third, and to make hanging up and calling me the easiest thing she does all day.

Tell me about your parent. I’ll take it from there.

They’re not betting you’re confused. They’re betting you’re courteous.

The people running these scams aren’t looking for someone confused. They’re looking for someone with manners. They’re counting on the fact that a person raised properly won’t hang up on them, and will listen when people sound genuine. It’s a cheap trick, and it works on smart people every day.

The answer isn’t to stop answering your phone or feeling like a bother when you ask your kids about something. You may feel uncomfortable admitting to your kids that you feel unsure or suspicious. You want to feel more in control of the situation.

What I do is help with the technical parts and further develop your instincts. Call blocking, filters, and the settings that keep the fake warnings from reaching you at all. Then we go through anything odd that may have gotten through, and I’ll show you ways to recognize these threats. No lecture. No worry from the kids.

You’ve been reading people your whole life, and that instinct hasn’t gone anywhere. It might just show up as “something doesn’t quite feel right about this message.” It’s almost always right. My job is to be the person who can verify before you fully trust.

If you’d like someone in your corner on this, call me.

What it looks like

The Phantom Hacker. The FBI has a standing warning on this one and it targets seniors specifically. Fake tech support says the computer is compromised and walks him into opening his financial accounts “to check for unauthorized charges,” which is really the scammer shopping for the fattest account. Then a second caller, posing as his bank, says a foreign hacker is inside and the money must move to a “safe account” at the Federal Reserve. Then a third, posing as a government official, confirms it, sometimes mailing something on official-looking letterhead. He is told throughout not to discuss it with anyone.

If not already suspicious, that last instruction should ring the warning bell. No legitimate institution would tell you not to discuss details like this with someone you know and trust.

Voice cloning. Thirty seconds of audio from a public video is enough. Last year the FBI logged more than 3,100 AI-related fraud reports from people over 60, totaling $352 million. The call comes late at night. “Grandma, I’ve been in an accident!” It might even look like the grandson’s real number. They may give you a number to call back. Maybe a lawyer, or a police officer, and almost always, “please don’t tell Mom.” The “emergency” is created to move faster than you can think.

What defuses it is a plan made on a calm afternoon. A question only the real grandson could answer. An agreement that no genuine emergency has ever required gift cards or a wire transfer in the next twenty minutes. And an agreement that hanging up and calling me is always allowed, at any hour, with no explanation needed.

None of that is complicated. It only has to exist before the phone rings.

In a text

The text about the unpaid toll isn’t from the toll company.

You’ve had one. Everyone has. It’s six dollars and change, there’s a link, and the amount is small enough that paying it is easier than thinking about it. That’s the design. No one disputes $6.75. They just tap and pay.

Here’s what makes this one different from a scam phone call. On the phone, something feels off, and that feeling is your defense. A text like this doesn’t feel like anything. It’s boring. It arrives while you’re doing something else. There’s no instinct to trust because nothing has gone wrong yet, and that’s exactly why it works.

So it needs a rule instead of a feeling, and the rule is short: never click the link in the message. If it might be Good To Go!, close the text and open the account you already have. If it might be your bank, call the number on the back of your card. The link is the only part of the message the scammer controls, so don’t use it.

That’s it. If you are unsure, send it to me. There’s no wrong question.

Send me the strange texts. That’s the service.

The FTC’s top five reported text scams

In order, from the FTC. Losses across all text scams in 2024 came to $470 million, more than five times the 2020 figure.

Fake package delivery. Impersonates USPS, claims a delivery problem, collects a card number as a “redelivery fee.”
Phony job offers. Rating products or apps. Pay to start, or pay to withdraw what you’ve earned.
Fake fraud alerts. Looks like your bank or Amazon flagging suspicious activity. Ends with money moved “for safekeeping.”
Unpaid toll notices. Locally this impersonates Good To Go!, and WSDOT has issued its own warning about it. Anyone with a 405 or 520 account has seen one.
“Wrong number” texts. A friendly mistake from a number you don’t know, a message written as if you’d already met, and a relationship built over weeks. Then a fake investment platform.

In your inbox

The email your father got has no virus, attachments, or blatant reasons to doubt it. So he acts on it.

It’s an invoice. Geek Squad, Norton, or McAfee. A renewal he doesn’t remember ordering, a few hundred dollars, charged to a card on file. There’s no link to click and nothing to download. The only action in the entire message is a phone number to call if he wants to cancel.

That’s why it gets through. There’s nothing for a spam filter to catch, because technically nothing is wrong with the email. The trap is the phone number, and he dials it himself.

What happens next is well documented. The man who answers is helpful. He’ll need to get onto the computer to process the refund. Then he’ll refund too much by “mistake,” and ask your father, apologetically, to send the difference back.

Software won’t stop that email, but we can help stop his action. When something with a dollar figure on it lands and he isn’t sure, he calls me instead of the number in the message.

Tell me about your parents. I’ll take it from there.

Why the filter never sees it

A spam filter looks for a suspicious link, attachment, or sender. This message has none of the three. The only dangerous content is a phone number, and the person receiving it takes action himself.

That is the honest limit of software, and it’s worth knowing before you spend money on more of it. Filters remove the noise. They cannot answer the question, “Should I call this number?”