podcast

The podcast discusses the increase in phone scams targeting people aged 65 and older. Research shows that the elderly are vulnerable to cyber attacks, including phishing scams and identity theft. The COVID-19 pandemic has made older adults more susceptible to phone scams as they spend more time at home. A survey was conducted to measure susceptibility to scams, with participants rating their agreement on various statements. The results showed that some older adults are more cautious than others. The podcast also includes personal anecdotes of scams experienced by older adults, including financial scams and dating scams. The research aims to understand why older adults are targeted and how they can protect themselves from scams. All right, hello everyone. So today's podcast is going to be about the increase in scams, particularly phone scams, that are targeted towards people of the age of 65 and older. In today's podcast, I'm joined by my grandpa. Would you like to introduce yourself? Thank you. I appreciate the invite. My name is Gary Bruce Sikoram, born in 1940, 83 years old, living in Hopkins, Minnesota. Awesome. So before we jump into all the questions and stuff, I'm just going to talk a little bit about some research that has already been done on this subject. So there was, in a peer-reviewed article entitled, Synthesizing Cybersecurity Issues and Challenges for the Elderly, this article was written by Zu Kipley and other authors. The authors wrote that cyber criminals preying on the elderly has become a serious problem nowadays. This is mostly due to the lack of cyber awareness amongst the elderly population. So people of 65 and older in this particular case, they write that there are four common types of cyber attacks used on the elderly. Those cyber attacks include phishing scams, behavioral attacks, consumer attacks, and identity theft. The elderly are the most targeted internet users by the fraudsters and cyber criminals. The elderly can be categorized as the most vulnerable targets amongst online scammers. So this was the article by Zu Kipley and the other authors and scholars that participated in that particular study. There was another article entitled, Financial Scams Targeting Older Adults During COVID-19, which was written by Scott Beach and also other scholars. In this article, they talked about how COVID-19 was a big year for phone scams as people were stuck at home and especially people who were a little bit older because they were more at risk because of COVID-19. And because a lot of people had to stay at home for their jobs and stuff, scammers had a lot, just a lot more times on their hands to just do that, target people who were staying at home due to COVID. Because of these articles and just previous stories that I have heard about, like scams on the phone, I decided it would be interesting to do a little bit of a research on this particular topic. And so in another study, they sort of created this survey. They called it the Susceptibility to Scam. So it's a scale, it's a five-item self-report measure in which the participant rated their agreements using a seven-point Likert scale. So basically what that means is just you're given a statement and then from one till seven, seven being strongly agree and seven being strongly disagree, you kind of just report where you stand within those seven points on the particular statement. So I sent this survey to three people. I'll discuss the results of this with you after I do it, after I survey Gary. So how about we jump right into that survey? How does that sound? Let's do it. All right. So the first statement is, I answer the phone whenever it rings, even if I do not know who is calling. So on the scale of one to seven, where would you rate like strongly agree being one and strongly disagree being seven? Seven. Okay. The second statement was, I have difficulty ending a phone call, even if the caller is a telemarketer, someone I do not know or someone I did not wish to call me. I have no problem hanging up. That'd be a what? A one or a seven? That would be, so it would be a seven. You strongly disagree. Oh, you got it. If someone sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Seven. So you, you strongly agree? Okay. You agree. Persons over the age of 65 are often targeted by con artists. Seven. Okay. Meaning you agree? I agree. Okay. If a telemarketer calls me, I usually listen to what they have to say. Disagree. Disagree. Okay. So that's the extent of the questions. Now I'm going to just go over the results of the other people that I interviewed. So of the three people on the first statement, which was, I answer the phone whenever it rings even if I do not know who is calling. We had different answers in that one. The first person that I sent out the survey to said that they strongly agreed. So they would answer the phone whenever they received the call. The second person was at a four. So it was kind of in the middle. So yeah. And then the third person was just like you. They said they didn't answer the phone call, like they didn't know who it was. The second statement, which was, I have difficulty ending a phone call even if the caller is a telemarketer, someone I do not know, or someone I did not wish to call me. I had two of the participants say that it was a little bit difficult. So they rated their skill at the strongly agree. And then the other one was like you who said that they had no problem doing it. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. So in that one, everybody said strongly agree. And then the persons over the age of 65 are often targeted by con artists. Same thing here. Everybody put strongly agree. And then the last one, which was if a telemarketer calls me, I usually listen to what they have to say. This one was a little bit not all over the place, but the first person rated theirs at a three. The second one at a four. And then the third one was at a seven. And so you were also at a seven. So that's that for the surveys. Now I'd just like to ask you a few questions about like scams, your phone usage, and stuff like that. So could you maybe describe your phone usage? What do you use your phone for the most? Personal, 80% business, and purchasing, 20%. Okay, and so when you say like business, is that like phone calls, like business phone calls? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And for the shopping, could you elaborate on like what that looks like? Amazon, Walmart, my insurance companies, things like that. Okay. And are you like when you put in like maybe your credit card to buy stuff online and stuff like that, are you usually pretty like vigilant on where that information goes to? I check my credit cards weekly. I use only one for online purchasing, and I use, what do we call it, double identification. I forget what we call that, duplicate identification. Yeah. And then do you kind of monitor which websites you give that information to? Very few. Okay. Only those that I'm familiar with, nobody else. Okay. And then do you know of anyone, or maybe you, that might have been a similar age as you that has been impacted by like phone scams? My niece was in a conference with somebody who claimed to be her bank. Okay. And she was 77 years old. And during that conference she was having with her bank, her daughter called her, to which she took the daughter's call. And she says, don't bother me. I'm talking to my bank on the phone. To which her daughter says, hang up, Ma. It's a scam. And she says, I can't do that. He's a nice guy. Hang up, Mom. Well, Mom hung up and sure as heck she was going to give her her social security number and her bank account number, to which the gentleman had not, if you will, contributed to the conversation. They ran to the bank. And that morning she was the third lady in her age group that had been, the same scam was run on her. Wow. Then we can go into the dating scam, if you want. We can go into just yesterday I had somebody send me a text that said, very simply, this bill, number 55555, has not been paid. Could you please contact us? Give me a break. Yeah. Okay. And then, oh, there have been others. It's just interesting. The dating scams are big ones, but you didn't ask, you didn't go there, so. Well, I mean, we can talk about that. Have you, like, what do you mean by dating scams? One of the gals that I work with at the food bank, she had a relationship on the phone and never have met the guy to where after 12 conversation, he tapped her for 6,000 bucks. He was in Africa and couldn't get to make contact with his bank. She was so infatuated with him. She sent him a cashier's check for $6,000. And then she called me and she said, Gary, I think I did something stupid. And she goes on to explain to me what she did. And I say, yeah, that was stupid. And she said, well, he's going to call me Tuesday and send me my money. And I said, no, he's not. He'll probably call you and ask for more money. Well, she never heard from him again. Yeah. Oh, and if I haven't heard that once, I've probably heard something like that three or four times already. Yeah, I mean, that's like the main reason I wanted to do this project is because I've heard of so many of those instances happening. And the thing that I noticed is that, like, personally, I get like those texts that tell me, like, click on the link. But I don't get them like super often. And like, for example, the dating one, like, I've never received anything about that. So I was wondering, like, what is it that, like, you know, makes people get those things? And what, like, the research shows is that oftentimes it's people that are older than 65. In this case, she was only 48. Yeah. So it's definitely, like, targeting, like, you know, not my generation, not the generation. And I think the main reason for that is because of how adept my generation is with technology and understanding that, like, people you don't know are able to send you texts and stuff like that. Yeah. And so, yeah, that was, like, the main reason I wanted to do this research. How often would you say you receive, like, maybe, like, texts or emails or maybe phone calls? Weekly. Weekly? Weekly. And how do you – do you mostly – do you deal with them always the same way? Like, you know that it's usually a scam? If it's not a logo from a company that I trust and I know that they don't send emails like that, I delete everything. I don't – I am very – I'm not trusting at all. Okay. So do you usually, like – do you think it's made you a little bit more skeptic about even receiving texts or emails from, like, your friends that might be in, like, the similar age range as you? If they're a friend, they are in my file or in my cardex, call it whatever you want. And I have it set up to where I recognize them as a friend. And if it's a signature, I recognize the signature. Otherwise, I don't acknowledge it. Yeah. There again, my circle of friends is pretty tight. And if they're texting me, I usually know the answer. I know the reason. Yeah. And then a question I had that I personally don't have the answer to. I just want to ask your opinion is what – like, how do you think we can maybe, like, prevent people that are in older generations from, you know, getting scammed like the dating scams or the social security scams and all that? How do you think – what would be a good way to go about, like, preventing these things from happening? In the case of my great niece – so my niece, I mean, who was the bank examiner, if you will. Okay. Since then, excuse me, AT&T has limited her incoming calls to the 12 people that her daughter had put on her – or her incoming phone list. They're the only ones that can get into her. And the same 12 are the only 12 calls she can make out. Yeah. That takes care of the phone thing. And you can do that with most of the phone carriers. If I'm on a computer or on your cell phone, you can block, but somebody has to show our generation how to block emails, how to block phone calls, how to block – it can be done. I know that. And then the other thing, you have to change your email every now and then. In my opinion. Not often you don't like doing that. No. No, and then some people also have multiple emails and stuff like that. Yes, I have three. Yeah, see. So I think there's a lot of possibilities. I think, yeah, I think the biggest thing is not having someone to maybe teach you how to block certain emails and things like that. So I think that'll be something that at least that we should look into as like a society. And because this is, I mean, this problem is growing and it's growing pretty fast, especially with artificial intelligence now. Because I don't know if you've heard, but now they're doing phone scans with artificial intelligence where the artificial intelligence will mimic the voice of a relative. And so they'll call you and, for example, for you, you might like receive a phone call by an unidentified number, but it's a regular number. You answer the phone call and it's my voice. And I'm saying, oh, grandpa, I got into a car accident. Can you send me like $500? And like the articles that I pointed out, you know, they mentioned a little bit. And I know that I've heard of this like famous YouTuber who that happened to her grandparents. So it's something that I think will like become a big problem. And so, yeah, I think there needs to be more solutions as to how we can educate people that are 65 or older on these particular things. But so just because I'm wondering, how do you think like you would deal or how like what would be a good way to deal with maybe that sort of scam where they mimic the voice of someone you know? Well, excuse me, I got something in my throat. You and I haven't even, we don't even have a picture of artificial intelligence. And I'll tell you what, if I got a call and somebody said I was an accident and I need 500 bucks, why the hell would they call me? I'd be the last guy I would call. I would say call your mom or dad or call your brother or call someone. I'm an old man. Why would you tap me? So I'd immediately say, yeah, you're barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, I'm not a nice grandpa. But yeah, your question is legitimate. And it has happened. There's no question about it within my circle of friends that has happened. I forgot about that one. Oh, geez. Just yesterday, Betty Jo and I were talking, and one of her daughter's friends got taken. And these are kids now, 53 years old, who got taken. So it's pretty sophisticated, and you have to be on your game. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. No, I completely agree. No, I completely agree. I mean, even with the voice thing, I think that could affect people of any age. But again, I think my generation has it maybe easier because we know of the existence of these things. We know that AI exists. Matter of fact, I think your generation is probably smart enough to have created most of them. Yeah. I mean, a lot of what is out there in terms of technology is getting created by people that are similar to my age. But to go back to the artificial intelligence, I think the biggest reasons why scammers target people that are 65 and older, as all of the articles that I talked about in the beginning say, is that it's just that they don't know as much about these technologies, about all of that. So it's just... However, your concentration on the seniors is certainly admirable. But I can tell you, in this country, a gentleman by the name of Bernie Madoff, largest scam operator in the history of the United States, except for the guy with the Bitcoin. Yeah. He got people continually being scammed over a period of 10, 15, 20 years to where they bought into a process that he had going. And with a ridiculous return, it finally blew up on him. There are others. I can tell you that I was caught in a scam at a 25-year-old. I was getting 10% a month on money for copper mines up in Canada, to which I was 25 at the time. And then I can tell you, fast forward 50 years, I just had a friend taken for millions on a scam. To which smart businessman, by the way, the sophistication is there. And we're all prone to be taken because we are looking for the lottery ticket. We want to win. So when somebody says there's 10% a month or a guaranteed 12% a year or whatever it is, the greed factor sets in and you overlook common sense. No, for sure. And I definitely think that scams affect everyone. There's no doubt about that. I have friends my age that have gotten caught by scams, but as the research suggests, people who are 65 and older are more likely to... Well, first of all, they're more targeted by scammers. For example, I don't get a text or an email asking me to click a link or calls on a weekly basis. I maybe get it once a month. And I use probably a lot more apps and I probably go on the internet a lot more than you do. So that's something that's interesting. I probably use technology more than you. Yet, because of your age, you're getting a lot more scam-related items going your way than I am. And a big reason for that is, just like previously mentioned, it's the knowledge piece where people my age are less likely to click on the links. And people that are 65 and older are pretty likely to... not necessarily likely to click on the link, but they're a lot more likely than any other demographic. So that's just why I wanted to do this whole research. I just wanted to ask you how you deal with all of that, what you think about it. And I really enjoyed just talking to you and listening to the stories about the people you know who have gotten scammed and all that. Let me just throw one more caveat at you. In your conversations or during your survey, there's a big difference in mentality between somebody who's been in business and run a business and somebody who, if you will, has worked behind the counter or has been a plumber or has been a teacher who's never dealt in business but done the mechanics behind the business. And there's a big difference in the thought processes with all of us. Oh, for sure. Anyway. Yeah. No, and I think that would be another interesting topic for research. But, yeah, no. But, yeah, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about this topic. I really enjoyed learning more about your use and just, I mean, doing the research in general, learning more about this particular topic and how it's going to sort of evolve throughout the next few years and see how we react to it, I think will be really interesting. So, yeah, thank you so much for joining me today. You bet. Thank you all. I appreciate the opportunity. All right. Have a good day. You too, sir. Thanks.