Fighting Scams Targeting the Elderly With Old-School Tech

itwbennett writes Sharp is launching a pair of landline phones designed to counter a growing form of fraud in Japan that preys upon the elderly. The 'ore ore' ('it's me, it's me') fraudsters pretend to be grandchildren in an emergency and convince their victims to send money, generally via ATM. Sharp's new phones are designed to alert seniors to the dangers of unknown callers. When potential victims receive that are not registered in the internal memory of Sharp's new phones, their LED bars glow red and the phones go into anti-scam mode. An automated message then tells the caller that the call is being recorded and asks for the caller to state his or her name before the call is answered.

Comments

A call? For me?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hot diggity! I don't care if it's bad news! It's you, it's you? And you want money? Fine, fine! Call back soon!!

State Your Name

[rodrigoandrade]

Any scammer worth his salt does his homework and already knows the victim's kids' / grandkids' names anyway, so this is kind of pointless.

Best advice is to hang up and try to contact the supposed kidnapped person first.

Re:State Your Name

[rodrigoandrade]

Replying to myself just to post that this new layout looks shit on Chromium. That's all I can get at work besides IE 9 and an outdated version of FF (20, I think)..

Re:State Your Name

[buchner.johannes]

Any scammer worth his salt does his homework and already knows the victim's kids' / grandkids' names anyway

That is not web-scale :)

Re:State Your Name

[Thanshin]

You shouldn't post just to say this layout is shit.

Which it is.

But you shouldn't.

And yet here we are.

Shit Shit Shit.

That will be all.

Re:State Your Name

[CrimsonAvenger]

Just curous - how did you do your first post? I don't have a "post" button, and can only "reply to this".

Though I suppose that could be intentional. Maybe you have to meet certain preconditions to be allowed to get "post" privileges.

Re:State Your Name

[Flavianoep]

Any scammer worth his salt does his homework and already knows the victim's kids' / grandkids' names anyway, so this is kind of pointless. Best advice is to hang up and try to contact the supposed kidnapped person first.

Not really. It's too much work doing research, those scammers work by infusing a sense of urgency to situation and the ones capable of keeping calm in the face of an emergency are the less gullible.
However, Sharp's strategy may backfire, for a scammer, upon being intercepted by a scam prevention system, may perceive that the person who he is calling as more likely to be vulnerable, and so, worth more effort.

Re:State Your Name

[westlake]

Sharp's strategy may backfire, for a scammer, upon being intercepted by a scam prevention system, may perceive that the person who he is calling as more likely to be vulnerable

The automated system that may have been put in place by family members, legal guardians, social services or the police?

Not worth the risk.

Re:State Your Name

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Any scammer worth his salt does his homework

I'm afraid not. The scammers tend to be high volume, low overhead operations. Some ongoing email scams and phone scams even seem tuned to fail very quickly for even slightly alert victims, so that the scammer's time isn't wasted on victims who will catch on somewhat further along in the process, and they can invest time in many, many more calls to much easier victims.

Re:State Your Name

[Cro Magnon]

FWIW, it also looks like shit on the current FF.

Re:State Your Name

[Cro Magnon]

I see a "post" button, but it's transparent. You might have just looked through it.

Re:State Your Name

[mlts]

Most of the scammers tend to be those casting a wide net. They bought an info dump with thousands of names, phone numbers, and such in it, feeding the numbers into a robodialer, and having people in a boiler room use names of relatives automatically on a scripted speech.

An anti-fraud device, or something asking for info to be called back at will be more than enough protection, because the scammer will just move to the next potential mark on the data dump and try them.

They try to be relatively quick about it. Eventually, bad number blocking sites like Mr. Number and others will have enough entries to have the fraudster's number blocked on devices subscribing to the service.

Re:State Your Name

[Cinnamon Beige]

Any scammer worth his salt does his homework and already knows the victim's kids' / grandkids' names anyway, so this is kind of pointless. Best advice is to hang up and try to contact the supposed kidnapped person first.

Not really. It's too much work doing research, those scammers work by infusing a sense of urgency to situation and the ones capable of keeping calm in the face of an emergency are the less gullible. However, Sharp's strategy may backfire, for a scammer, upon being intercepted by a scam prevention system, may perceive that the person who he is calling as more likely to be vulnerable, and so, worth more effort.

That depends, really, on if it's actually recording and if it's known to be. If it's recording, then it becomes evidence for a criminal case, moving things out of civil court and also making the shell game riskier as that likely courts prosecution under RICO or the local equivalent.

The person may be more likely to be vulnerable, but the risks go up, especially as a larger payoff is likely to also increase the odds of those recordings being checked.

I just must be drunk.

[EzInKy]

I was going to reply to the article, but for the life of me I couldn't find the "post" button. Things have been really out of sorts on the top menu too., Guess this is Dice's way of forcing "beta" upon us no matter how much we've told them we don't like it.

Anyway, back on topic. Why not just teach seniors to tell anyone claiming to be their grandchild to call their parents if they need money? It's not as if haven't spent a good portion of their lives paying to support parasites already, right?

Re:I just must be drunk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why call anyone? Why not demand a basic income from the government, and then no one will ever have need of money ever again! It's the perfect solution to every problem: basic income.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[dbIII]

Slashdot today - where economists tell scientists, engineers and others that don't do fortune telling for a living to get a grip on reality. Pretty funny isn't it?

Re:I just must be drunk.

[berberine]

Anyway, back on topic. Why not just teach seniors to tell anyone claiming to be their grandchild to call their parents if they need money? It's not as if haven't spent a good portion of their lives paying to support parasites already, right?

Because hearing gets bad as you age and you're not totally sure it's your grandkid or not. Because people suffer dementia when they get older. Because it's easy to confuse people when they get older. Because if you're a scammer and you're good at what you do, it's easy to guilt people or threaten people into giving you money.

There's a reason these scams are done worldwide. They work. I saw my own very intelligent grandma fall victim to a phone scammer once. She never would have fallen for it in her younger days, but at 85, those fast talking bastards nearly cleaned her bank account out. My mom was able to get all her money back after about 14 months. And you know what, my grandma died in 2011 and those fuckers are still calling. They told my mom last week that they had just talked to my grandma and she authorized payment so my mother better stop meddling, or else. My mom told them to feel free to go to the police and report her.

It happens. It doesn't matter how old you are. Pressure tactics, when done right, are scary as hell, particularly to the elderly. I live in a small town and the banks here already have similar alerts available. If you try to make a payment that is out of the ordinary, which you set up what would be considered normal transactions, they won't allow payment until they speak with you or your representative. Just because you've been used to scams your whole life, doesn't mean you still won't fall victim to one.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[TheCarp]

Yes because basic human compassion for your own family is such a negative trait, maybe we should beat it right out of people?

Good luck. Yah, ALL we have to do is convince a significant number of people to ignore basic human empathy if that empathy is not within our narrow world view. People are free to live how they want as long as they do so in the way you have proscribed for them, problem solved eh?

Re:I just must be drunk.

[hodet]

the teale colored "Post" text on teale background makes it hard to see.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[BarbaraHudson]

That alone isn't going to help the poster. See the horizontal green bar between the article and the first post? Hover your mouse just inside the left side to see the "Post" button. If you continue to the right a bit, you'll see the "Load All Comments" button. Welcome to "Find Waldo, Slashdot Edition".

Re:I just must be drunk.

[EzInKy]

Think about it as being along the lines of the "just say no" campaign. Grandparents have no legal duty to bail out grandchildren, and both grandparents and grandchildren should be taught that.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[N1AK]

Grandparents have no legal duty to bail out grandchildren

You seem to be labouring under the delusion that this has anything to do with legal duty. Think of it as the risk people take for not being a selfish and uncaring douchebag.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[N1AK]

I still find it hard to comprehend why more isn't done to protect people from scammers and pursue those who run these scams. A government can easily put eye-bleedingly large fines on any company who provides a phone number that is used for scamming. This would make the companies who provide the UK/US/etc numbers on the end of overseas scams far more cautious about who they provide them to.

Then you're only left with foreign calls which a) cost scammers vastly more, b) already look very suspect, and c) can be dealt with by penalising countries that provide a safe-harbour to scammers.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[Cro Magnon]

OT reply: I wasn't drunk, but as soon as I saw Slashdot today, I was ready to get drunk!

Re:I just must be drunk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know anything at all about human relationships? Anything?
Because this post makes it seem like you could not possibly be more clueless.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[Anonymous Coward]

I will say this... if the US gave every citizen minimum wage, and 40 hours worth of it for a year, that would be less money spent than all the "free" MRAPs that are winding up being handed out to police departments.

Now think about the economic implications of that. With baseline spending money, that means local businesses will get a constant stream of that spending. Which means more jobs and more tax income coming in.

No, this isn't communism. It is an income baseline, and one is definitely free to work and earn more. This can easily be financed on a tax on companies who decide to "invert" to bug out of the US for tax haven states.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[mlts]

VoIP scams are easy to do. For example, callerID is fairly easy to forge and it doesn't cost much money to set up a boiler room and staff it with people who do this. This allows a company to be in India, but still call from a US number.

To boot, there are very stiff fines... but have you seen how a lot of the robocall firms are organized? Most have a lot of holding corporations that they work with, one owns the furniture, one pays the employees, one possesses the computer data, so when the main company, say XYZ corp, gets sued, they just file bankruptcy, then a new company, ABC corp gets created, and they are back in business the next day. To boot, all of these companies are registered offshore, so finding the true owners will be virtually impossible unless the company decides to hit a third rail in the US (drugs, guns, and IP violations.)

Re:I just must be drunk.

[Archangel Michael]

I've trained my mom, (older, confused) to call me immediately if she is confused about something someone calling her is telling her. It works, because she understands that I will protect her.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[Anonymous Coward]

QA is so overrated.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[TheCarp]

> Think about it as being along the lines of the "just say no" campaign

Yes, I did, that was a moronic campaign too. Just like the "just say no" campaign, its entirely useless slogan by people who don't understand a problem and who have no desire to actually help anything, they just want an excuse to say "A solution exists, so go fuck yourself and leave me alone"

Re:I just must be drunk.

[morgauxo]

Of course not! This is Slashdot! The only relationships here are between player and videogame character... consumated in mother's basement!

Re:I just must be drunk.

[doccus]

Ah.. classical economics.. where everything made sense. You must have been reading some mighty old textbooks. Don't let your prof see you reading anything other than neo-classical economics texts these days.. or the idea that money actually "trickles up" might caatch on again.. Can't have that now. Back near 100 years ago, the cabals of the wealthy got together and, based on their experience from the depression, realized that the financial impact to them of an entire segment of society being in dire poverty was catastrophic. In order to preserve what they had and to keep complete social breakdown from occuring, they realized the option of treating the problem with increased policing jails and hospitalization was more expensive by several *orders of magnitude* , whereas providing a no questions asked stipend for the poor, single moms (there were no single dads beck then) , the elderly, and sick was far less considering the benefits to them (the wealthy). Compassion wasn't a factor in the decision. Somewhere down the line, however, they got so wealthy that the conditions in society at large could no longer touch them, and so they stayed out of any debates where people started asking "why are we supporrting these poor, sick, and elderly freeloaders? "If they're poor it's because they're too lazy to work", and "if they're sick or elderly, they're just taking up hospital bed space that could be used by a deserving young person.. .." If they'd rather die than go to a welfare hospital, then let them die ..all the better to decrease the surplus population." After all - "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" (THX Mr Dickens!) So there's no surprise that since the purse strings for social sevices dried up, society has gone to rot. The Cabal of the wealthy knew the consequences of such actions, even 100 years ago...

Re:I just must be drunk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why stop there? If 40 house of a living wage is good, why not double or quadruple that? Think of all the disposable income that would release!

Re:I just must be drunk.

[RivenAleem]

I never realised this before. Until someone actually puts it in a sentence like that. Economists ARE fortune tellers... mind blown.

Re:I just must be drunk.

[Anonymous Coward]

f the US gave every citizen minimum wage, and 40 hours worth of it for a year,

You claim this isn't communism. Yet you seem to ignore the part where the "US" doesn't have any money.

It has to take the money from it's citizens. Redistributing wealth to ensure is classic Marx socialism.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Sound familiar?

Re:Interesting retort

[Thanshin]

Oh, and of course I shall spend mod points exclusively on promoting anti new layout posts.

And here I was, thinking this was going to be a boring day.

Re:Interesting retort

[Thanshin]

As an additional perk, maybe I'll get to respond a question I've had for a decade: "How long would it take me to return to Excellent karma with a new account?".

Shit layout...

A rightwing wankfest?

[EzInKy]

I didn't mean to launch one at all by my post. In the long run though, 90% of all human production will be automated so, unless you are willing to bring back "The Commons" from which people can pluck from what they want, some basic form of subsistance will need to be created. The way it is now a man can hardly go on a hunt without violating some government enforced property right.

Re:A rightwing wankfest?

[Yomers]

Population of this planet consume resources much faster than they are renewed, it can not last long. Our options are limited - we can continue as now, until real peak oil, peak population, peak production is reached, then kill each other for the leftovers. Another possibility is building a stable society - all the green stuff, birth control, no wars, probably no private enterprises, probably one de facto world government and total control - stagnation. Next is a science fiction dream - we colonise another planets, continue extensive development - wild west all over again, Firefly. The only path that guarantee survival of the humanity in a long run, but the least probable of all - looks like we gave up hopes on this one. And the last option would be to kill that 90% of population, more contagious ebola with longer incubation period? Considering that it is probably much easier to secretly develop bioweapon with cure or vaccine than to create cure in relatively short time - game theory in action, this outcome looks almost inevitable, even MAD not gonna help this time. Why I was telling all this? Because of the bright side - you probably should not worry about future unemployment :)

Re: A rightwing wankfest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your first sentence is a lie. If that were true all life would have starved to death many times by now.
Your imagination is too wild and you let professional debators plant their lies in your head.
The rest of your post is also fantasy BS put in your head by someone else.

Re:A rightwing wankfest?

[EzInKy]

birth control,

There is at least one major world religion that will launch a crusade if that became universal.

Re: A rightwing wankfest?

[Immerman]

Actually, no. What you're forgetting is that the planet is *huge*, even the massive consumption of the entire human race is only a tiny fraction of it's total capacity biomass.

We are currently consuming biological resources at somewhere between 1.5x and 2x the rate at which the planet can produce them. Remember it's a living, *growing* system - so long as we consume things no faster than it grows, the system is sustainable. As it is though we're "spending the capital" - not only are we consuming the new growth, but we're also reducing the "base" biomass so that, on average, next year things will grow more slowly than they did this year, and that trend will continue until we reduce consumption sufficiently.

Fishing is probably the most obvious example of this - go find some photos of the docks with fishermen showing their prizes from the 1800s: huge 4-8 foot fish all over the place, while today you rarely see anything over a couple feet. We've been "strip-mining" the ocean for centuries, and as a result the total yields have been falling for almost as long.

Re:A rightwing wankfest?

[Immerman]

Which? Christians are by and large fairly open to it, and even among the usually extremist Catholics we've got the Pope explicitly taking a hands-off approach to the question.

Re:A rightwing wankfest?

[jmac_the_man]

birth control,

There is at least one major world religion that will launch a crusade if that became universal.

You can't actually make it universal. Leave it to Slashdot to not think that one through.

Re: A rightwing wankfest?

[HornWumpus]

All time peak fish catch was 1996, 94 million tons. This year 90 million tons.

Got a better example? How about one that isn't wrong?

Re: A rightwing wankfest?

[Immerman]

You're talking catch, not quantity of available fish - catch naturally increases with better technology, but as available fish reserves are depleted that only makes the problem worse. Both total mass of fish, and individual specimen size have been declining for a *very* long time. But hey, maybe we can learn to eat jellyfish, they seem to be thriving in the warmer, less predator-rich waters.

Re:A rightwing wankfest?

[eric_harris_76]

Well, the only source for new iron is what comes hurtling through the atmosphere from above. Despite this, I'm not worried about running out of iron ore.

The notion of "peak oil", to the extent it's meaningful, is useless. We'll never run out of petroleum. When it gets too hard to pump out of the ground or to separate from shale or whatever, people will use something else to turn into fuel or lubricant or chemical feedstock or pavement. The remaining petroleum will stay in the ground, just like the petroleum that's currently not worth pumping up at about $50/bbl.

Might want to check out this social science known as "economics". Turns out if you ignore the hooey being shoveled (often in an attempt to influence government policy), you'll find some useful concepts with broad applicability.

Doomsday scenarios have appeal, but tend to be false alarms, with no consequences to those who hawk them.

Re: A rightwing wankfest?

[HornWumpus]

'Total yield' is there for all to see. You are a liar who can't admit he is wrong.

Re: A rightwing wankfest?

[Immerman]

I really, REALLY wish that were true.

Re: A rightwing wankfest?

[HornWumpus]

No you don't. You prefer to scream DOOM!

Re:Interesting retort

[dbIII]

A decade ago it was easy - post a pile of crappy jokes and karma is up to 50 in no time. Now there's apparently no karma for jokes, so the easy way to get mod points is to say X is shit and Wayland is not just for phones and tablets sometime soon but can now do everything X can now. The easy way to lose points and attract foes is to politely point out that neither is the case. Pick another trendy topic like bitcoin evangelism for similar results.

wtf

[X10]

I like this new feature "hidden post button"

Re:wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

On the plus side, slashdot being trainwrecked by Dice and their beta plans gives me more time to read other sites that actually have news I give a shit about rather than the clickbait headlines and horribly sensationalized summaries.

Re:wtf

[ledow]

Someone had to tell me - It's there if you hover over the bar, but for some reason the "Change" button (which I've never used) is as grey and obvious as it ever was.

Re:wtf

[CrimsonAvenger]

Aha! My thanks! I never would have suspected that that's where the "Post" button was.

Math?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF do *you* know about math? Are you an economist? Ah, thought so.

Crappy layout indeed

[Alwin Henseler]

I'm with you there... never mind the story, this layout sucks!

Btw: if you include something to this effect in the subject line, it'll show up in comment pages more often / earlier.

Happened to my grandmother

[Guppy]

Yeah, these scammers tried hitting my grandmother before, fortunately she's still pretty sharp and recognized it immediately.

That being said, with social media, these kinds of scams have the capability to become a lot worse. The scammer that called my grandmother did a generic "grandmom it's me", which didn't work because my Chinese is pretty accented as an American-born speaker -- instant giveaway from the first word out of his mouth.

But with a little research they could have loaded it up with a lot more detail.

Re:Interesting retort

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'm going to be sick.

Re:Interesting retort

[ledow]

Well, when they're only getting 20-30 comments on most stories now, of course they have to remove quite how few they get on each article from the front page listing too.

I found the "Post" button!

[wonkey_monkey]

Wow, that was a fun game Slashdot, but I finally found the hidden "Post" button.

Green text on a very slightly darker green background? Genius!

Get your act together. You're looking even more amateurish than usual.

FUCK THIS LAYOUT

[Anonymous Coward]

Just joining the theme. Are there more ads? IE has a Style, none, which works well for FUCK THIS LAYOUT sights.

Captcha: Fuckbeta

Re:FUCK THIS LAYOUT.

[Gaygirlie]

To be quite frank, that Soylent-thing doesn't look any better.

Oh, COME ON!

[pscottdv]

Slashdot. Seriously? The Post button is all but completely hidden and elements are randomly overlaying other elements. Sigs are on top of the reply links. "You may like to read links" overlay the "voting on submissions" text. Buttons appear and disappear as you hover over them. Everything just has a smashed-together feel.

Is it really so very, very hard to just leave things alone?

Re:Oh, COME ON!

[wonkey_monkey]

Is it really so very, very hard to just leave things alone?

If you keep playing with it, it'll fall off.

Re:Oh, COME ON!

[SpineZ]

ctrl + f5 does wonders...

Re:Interesting retort

[rsmith-mac]

I'm with you there. This really is a terrible layout, to the point that I first thought it was Firefox that was broken rather than Slashdot.

I've got a hidden Post button. Reply/Share links are overlaying comment text. Deep comments only fill the left half of the page. And everything else is unbounded to the left, resulting in stories and root comments being nearly the entire width of my screen.

Surely this was tested before it was rolled out, right?

Re:Interesting retort

[Thanshin]

Actually, the less modest question was "how long does it take to recover excellent karma by the simple system of receiving karma points on my often witty, insightful and thought provoking posts."

If I keep digging deeper, probably by the time I reach the reptilian brain the question is: "How long will these above average monkeys need to recognize me as the beacon of intelligence I am."

"Fighting Scams" are targeting the elderly?

[ionymous]

Aren't there enough scams out there that target the elderly? Now there are "fighting scams"?
It's so frustrating I can't even RTFA.

Re:"Fighting Scams" are targeting the elderly?

[Anonymous Coward]

They only target their fighting scams at the elderly who have old-school tech, though, so I guess that's slightly better?

Re:Interesting retort

[Marginal Coward]

The layout problem mirrors the headline problem, though presumably the latter is more transient. It took me quite a while to figure out that the headline wasn't about the elderly being targeted by scams involving fighting. But I could have immediately parsed "Fighting Scams That Target the Elderly."

Need more aggressivity

[Anonymous Coward]

The phone should start anti-scam mode as described, but also announce (and perform) that the call will be charged an extra of $50 / €50 (or whatever similar in yen), and duration's based $1 / €1 per second. (as the various regulation do not want a price per non-divisible minute, but second is ok).

I want one ! (even if the charge goes to the phone company and not me).

Hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets fuckup things that didn't need fucking with!

Re:Interesting retort

[dbIII]

Hence my reply that witty doesn't do it anymore. Going with a group following a fad does. However not all fads are worthless and getting to max karma with dumb jokes like I did was a flaw in the previous system.

Re:Interesting retort

[BarbaraHudson]

The only problem I'm seeing (or not seeing, pardon the pun) is the hidden "Post" and "Load all comments" buttons.

Comments are full-screen (they weren't at some point yesterday, but I guess they fixed that, at least on some portions of the site), and the "Reply to this", "Parent", and "Share" links are laid out properly.

Re:Interesting retort

[Thanshin]

Surely this was tested before it was rolled out, right?

If only that was the first time I heard that question today.

If only Slashdot's answer wasn't the same as mine: "...Hmm... nnn.. Yes?... I mean... Yes! Of course!"

This new layout is shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm off to Hacker News
 
Fuck this place, and fuck Dice.

Happened to me / my mother-in-law and my mother.

[McFly777]

It was Christmas time, and we were at my mother-in-law's house for the holiday, when she received a call. The person on the other end claimed to be my nephew, calling grandma because he had gone for a joy ride with friends and gotten in an accident with the car. (He didn't quite have his license yet, so it was possible, even if slightly out of character.) He said he broke his nose, to explain why his voice sounded funny, and that he was calling from the police station to get bail, but was too embarrassed to call his dad. He wanted to explain what happened face-to-face with his parents, not over the phone.

The acting was very convincing, and really did almost sound like my nephew... with a broken nose. While my wife kept trying to ask questions about what police station he was at, etc, I called his parents on my cell-phone, and found out my nephew was sitting at the breakfast table with them. Before I could relay that however, the scammer must have gotten tired of my wife's questions, because he said the police were taking the phone away, and that his court appointed lawyer would call us back shortly. (We never got the second call from the "lawyer.")

On my side of the family, my mother almost was caught by an overseas bail extortion call. A cousin of mine was travelling in China, where the call claimed a relative was being held. My mother actually got to the credit union to withdraw the money, where the teller (who knows her) stopped her from doing so. I only heard about that one after the fact.

My wife got called by a Nigeria scam (sort of). The person claimed she had won a car in a drawing, but needed her to wire the sales tax for the vehicle. Coincidently, she had recently put a ticket in a drawing at the county fair, so there was a possibility, but a bunch of things didn't pass the "smell test." She kept asking questions, and the final clue was the phone number which the scammer gave for her to call back once she had purchased a Green Dot money card. The number was from one of the Caribbean islands which have an area code like a US call (not an obviously international call), but since it wasn't local, my wife looked it up. (We later got a sales call from a local travel agent regarding the county fair drawing; we didn't win the car, but could visit a timeshare if we wanted.)

My face when

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't find the goddamn post button

More illiteracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

"When potential victims receive that are not registered in the internal memory of Sharp's new phones"

Receive what?
And why is the Post button hidden?

And why no mention of 'climate change' in this article? This is 'Climatedot' after all, isn't it?

Common in the U.S. Too

[nealric]

My 87 year old Grandfather recently got one of these calls. Fortunately, he is still very sharp and smelled a rat. They called and said "Hi, it's your grandson". He said, which one? They said, "you know, your Grandson!" and proceeded to come up with a story asking for money. Since my Grandfather has 11 grandchildren and 4 grandsons, that didn't exactly narrow things down. He figured it was a scam and hung up. But I worry that one day his mind won't be so sharp.

Re:Common in the U.S. Too

[Anonymous Coward]

But I worry that one day his mind won't be so sharp.

That doesn't necessarily mean he'll have trouble, though: one of these scammers called up my grandmother. The scam fell flat with the second word out of his mouth -- she may not be able to remember what she had for breakfast, or even reliably recognize us on sight, but she knows damn well that none of us ever called her "gramma".

She also hasn't lost the ability to chew someone out in fine fashion.

Fun to torment them

[wikthemighty]

When I was living in my grandfather's house after he moved to an old folks' home, and before we sold it I used to toy with these assholes. They'd ask for "Mr. wikthemighty" (which I was) and I'd go along with their schemes and ask them all sorts of odd questions, and eventually they'd run in to "oh, I'm not that Mr. wikthemighty - he doesn't live here anymore" or "he's dead, you need to update your records" or whatever I felt like saying at the time... My mom died in 2007 and my dad still gets mail and calls for her.

This is Slashdot calling

[PPH]

Pay us or you'll never see your Post button again!

Not trying indeed

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Ok, let's deal with abouy 80% of the dollars scammed out of retirees the past 30 years.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm putting a child block on all your home shopping channels, grampa."

These things specialize in convincing the lonely elderly the hosts are their friends, with peals of joy and friendship when purchases are made. Look! She likes me!

Spend thousands a week, blow thru $20,000 of savings in a month.

To quote a wise opinion on the subject from several years ago, "Kill yourselves."

"That's not very funny!"

"I'm not trying to be funny. Kill yourselves."

Re:Not trying indeed

[roc97007]

Good point about the home shopping network, but I guess my feeling is that it's the grandparents' money, they earned it, and if they want to blow it, that should be their decision.

True story. My grandfather confessed an idea of doing some traveling -- cross country road trip, international travel, cruises. I said, why don't you do that? He said, they're saving their money to pass along to their children (my mom and aunt).

You know what? Screw that. I lobbied hard for the grandparents to get out and do what they've always wanted to do, now that they're retired but still fairly mobile. To hell with inheritance. Their kids (who were adults in their forties at the time) could damn well learn to fend for their silly selves.

The grandparents did partially take my advice, and traveled some before illness took my grandfather. I'm glad they got to do at least some of the items on their bucket list. And I'm really ok with the fact that their daughters had less to fight over when they passed.

D10 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

D10? Surely you mean D20, right?
Roll for initiative!

Re:Interesting retort

[sethstorm]

Praise Edward Snowden.

Re:Interesting retort

[desdinova 216]

maybe, and don't call me Shirley...

this is so easy to circumvent

[roc97007]

We only have one child. At a very early age, about the time she could memorize the home address and house phone number, we decided on a passphrase.

The phrase is fairly random, not anything that could be gleaned from facebook accounts or other personal records. It's multiple words, (like the XKCD "correct horse battery staple") so one of us could say part of the phrase and the other could say the other part, which authenticates both parties.

Once a month or so, when I picked her up from school or dropped her off from an event, or some other time when we were alone, I would say "what's the passphrase" and she'd repeat it to me. Now 17 years later, she still remembers the phrase, and only her, my wife and I know it.

We've never needed it.

But if I get a call from someone saying "daddy I need money right now or they're going to put me in prison" or some other permutation of the scam, I would ask "What do you need to say?" (The answer is not "please".)

This solution is really easy to implement and requires no technology. (Which is probably why it doesn't show up on Slashdot.)

Were I to do it over again, I'd have all of us memorize two passphrases, one that means "I am me and I am making this request" and "I am me but I am being coerced into making this request". I still might do that.

Hopefully, when my daughter has kids, she'll teach them a passphrase. (And share it with the grandparents.)

Where did I get this idea? I am a little embarrassed to say. It was from a Hardy Boys novel, circa early 1960's. The father, who is himself a detective, always puts a tiny mark under his signature. The signature authenticates him, and the mark means "I'm ok". If his signature does not contain the mark, it is either a forgery, or he's being coerced into signing.

Re:this is so easy to circumvent

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea - see http://www.metacafe.com/watch/an-l409JJYYbhbbum/the_bourne_ultimatum_2007_nicky_helps_bourne/