It is not just the elderly who can be victimized. These callers use sophisticated scripts to scare people, engaging the fight-or-flight reflex. Once you feel profoundly threatened, parts of your brain physically shut down, quickly making you far dumber and more easily manipulated by somebody promising to save you.
Plenty of smart, young engineers have fallen for phishing scams with similar structures. The elderly and ignorant are especially vulnerable, but every single one of us, without exception, is vulnerable to being conned.
We'll usually agree afterwards that it could have been easy to see from the right perspective. Hindsight blinds us to the reasons people are vulnerable in the first place.
Right. I recently experienced this, when I got an Email from Amex that there had been a suspicious transaction on my card and asking me to confirm it and call them if I hadn't made it. Since it was a 460 EUR charge from some online wine shop in Spain, I did call the number in the email and only when I was in the middle of telling them my card details (including CVC, of course) I realized that I could be talking to a scammer, so I stalled a little and googled the number, confirming that it was indeed a legit Amex support number.
Companies really should design their procedures more to not look like social engineering...
Plenty of smart, young engineers have fallen for phishing scams with similar structures. The elderly and ignorant are especially vulnerable, but every single one of us, without exception, is vulnerable to being conned.
We'll usually agree afterwards that it could have been easy to see from the right perspective. Hindsight blinds us to the reasons people are vulnerable in the first place.