> LPT: Please have a codeword or phrase that you use with your loved ones
They keep refusing ideas like these on the grounds of them being “not stupid” and “able to see through such attempts immediately, 100% of the time” and “do you think we’re stupid?”
They might actually be a bit stupid, but maybe they'll do it if you tell them it's because you are worried that you would fall for a scammer impersonating them. That at least would let them keep their stupid pride.
Identifying the voice as fake is not the main defense against these scams, though. The main defence is recognising the situation and taking a step back to double-check. Primarily the scammers are trying to stop you from engaging your critical thinking by putting you under pressure and a very useful skill in life is recognising those situations and pushing back on them.
You don’t even need this. You just ask “what did we do last Tuesday”. A scammer will hang up, even if the actual answer is “I haven’t seen you in two years”.
I'm getting a lot of calls recently and don't give them more than a Hello and whatever music, radio show or Tour de France broadcast I'm listening to. Sometimes they hang in there for half a minute.
Sometimes if I’m suspicious about the number now, I just answer and say nothing. A human will get confused after 5 seconds and say “Hello?Hello??” But the very shitty bots that usually call, just wait patiently for a long time for your hello, and don’t seem at all fazed by it.
Yeah, recently I've had quite a few legitimate ones, mostly having to do with home renovations or other transactions.
I like most am deeply unsatisfied with the archaic system though of a basically unchangeable 10-digit number granting permission for anyone to fill up my phone with messages and interrupt me with calls, and hate that I have to ever answer calls from a number I don't know.
I really would like a mutual opt-in system, where you have to pre-establish consent before it's even possible to message or call you, but it seems impossible to get there from here. We can't even get the stupid cell phone companies to strongly enforce that caller ID isn't spoofed!
The article mentions this strategy, and points out that when confronted with an emotional emergency situation, the victims simply might not remember to use the protocol.
A terse, altered "Hello" is all I say. Sometimes I don't say anything. Most humans would wait a few seconds then prompt with "...Hello?", whereas bots tend to hang up after ~2s silence
That's my experience too. I mostly don't pick up calls from numbers that I don't recognize. On the very rare occasion that I am expecting such a call, I always stay silent after picking up. A real human will without fail start talking after a second or two.
When it is a human scam caller, what I sometimes do is to say "Hello" and then, when they start talking, and I can already guess they are full of shit, I act as if I am not hearing them properly and say "Hello?? Heeellooo? Hello?" Then they hang up lol.
Because Reasons I'm looking at several feature-phone / dumbphone options.
One feature that's conspicuously missing from many of these is "unknown call block" or equivalent.
Which is completely staggering to me.
I'm looking at other options, including VOIP / SIP Trunking, where it should in theory be possible to incorporate any arbitrarily complex call-screening feature(s), though Further Research is Needed.
Android / iOS phones typically have several available options for call screening. Unfortunately they include numerous other issues and negatives.
I somewhere read about a service that would use AI generated voices to combat these scam calls, basically talking to the forever. Forgot the name though...
LPT: Please have a codeword or phrase that you use with your loved ones so even if the scammers use your voice, they won't know the phrase.