[YeGoblynQueenne]

Nothing to do with cognitive decline. From the article:

>> It is tempting, and wrong, to attribute the targeting of older adults to naivety. The brief that prompts this article identifies a more uncomfortable truth: the characteristics that make older people disproportionately vulnerable are not deficiencies of intelligence but features of a life well lived. They tend to hold higher average savings balances, the accumulated product of decades of work, which makes them efficient targets — a single successful call can yield far more than one aimed at a younger person. They were raised in, and still operate within, established patterns of trust-based communication, in which a phone call from a distressed relative is answered as a genuine emergency rather than interrogated as a potential attack. They are, through no fault of their own, relatively unfamiliar with the existence of AI voice synthesis, having spent most of their lives in a world where a voice on the line was definitionally a person on the line. And they are exposed, like every parent and grandparent, to the particular emotional architecture of the family-emergency scenario, in which the instinct to protect a child overrides every slower, more sceptical faculty.