fraud protection

For those few who still have landline phones, scammers make them ring. It has become a source of entertainment in our home to string scam callers past the bot to the frenetic-sounding call center. Or we just let the phone ring 3 times – bots have limited patience. But there is one benefit of having an actual conversation with a call center rep, as well as watching TV Medicare Advantage advertising. These unsolicited caller scripts (‘is anyone in the home between the ages of 65 and 85?’) and ads are built on stereotypes of older adults (mostly women) and the premise that they are just plain stupid. Apparently they can’t do their own research and are desperate for advice. By the way, if CMS is ‘restricting’ Medicare Advantage plan advertising, that is not yet visible to a TV viewer.  

Who do you trust? Rant on. A long WSJ article details how trusting people can be and why robocall scams work.  A woman listened to a voice mail message saying that it was the FBI and that her identity had been stolen. (That was the first and only robo-dialed call).  When they spoke, the caller told her to turn over all savings, further telling her not to tell anyone about his step-by-step instructions as to where to move the money, nearly $340,000. Why did this 60-something oncology nurse listen to this caller over a several-day period?  Why did she agree to stay in a hotel for two days while the money was in motion?

Scammers are creative – each cell phone number is a 'smishing' opportunity.  It's the holidays, when scammers want to wish you the best of everything. How about a text message with a picture of the sender, someone you know, pitching a fund-raising and time-limited opportunity – in a category the recipient knows well.  Except that it is fake, finding the phone number because it is widely distributed. And as an added bonus, the sender extracts the picture from now-accessible contacts (easily scraped from LinkedIn, press releases, Gmail messages, etc.).  Scammers seize the opportunity and send you a very believable text message.

Reading the employee microchip article – does it make you shudder?  Observe the development and evolution of modifiers for the word technology.  Words like sustainable, appropriate, autonomous all come to mind. With the micro-chipping of employees – the convenience argument is ultra thin. But why would one think about a microchip for an ailing relative, aka an older adult? (Some say we will all get chipped eventually.)  Consider that these "chips will offer a convenient way to track people — especially those suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia."  But who will opt in to being chipped and tracked in that example?  Employees could opt out – but can a person with dementia opt out?  How different is being micro-chipped from wearing a band with identifying address information? For whom is the 'convenience' of micro-chipping offered?  And because it is possible, should it be deployed?

Many years ago, when the phone rang, we eagerly picked it up.  That was then. For good or ill, families want to text, message and chat. And the phone call has turned into a source of harassment and scams. Robocalling is a modern torment, sometimes multiple back-to-back dials from the same source, often spoofing our own cell phone numbers – where answering the phone puts us on a ‘sucker list’ sold to other scammers. Is it Rachel from Cardmember Services or the IRS Phone Scam,  a fake carpet cleaning offer or worse, the disabled veterans scam, or the grandparent 'this is your grandson' scam? 

Too much road noise, no self-driving information.  So how safe are self-driving cars for us, those pesky consumers who are also the victims of this tech for tech's sake?  Ask yourself – how would you know? Even the NTSB doesn’t want you to know details of accidents involving Tesla’s Autopilot.  Let’s remember the so-called problem being hustled into the market -- to reduce the most recently cited number (40,000) of deaths from auto accidents. They are astonishingly low already, according to a Rand study, at 1 per 100 million miles traveled. According to the Wall Street Journal article, Tesla promised to release safety data on its self-driving tech regularly starting next quarter, though they have not said what sort of data and what could be gleaned from it -- perhaps in advance of another series (see link) of crashes.