> My dad is not a gullible man. He grew up low-income at the border of Brooklyn and Queens, where street smarts were a survival mechanism. A 30-year career teaching high school students trained him to sniff out bullshit from a mile away.
Your dad was not a gullible man.
My dad was a very aggressive and assertive person throughout his life, didn't trust anyone, lived through some very hard times like post-war Italy where apparently even the feral cats vanished for lack of food.
Then in retirement it's like everything experienced which conditioned him to be that way just faded away. His edge dulled substantially.
The last time I traveled with him we were approached by someone on the streets of Palermo who was obviously (to me) sizing us up. Within minutes of talking with this total stranger my dad had revealed where both his money and passport were kept on his person. I had to abruptly intervene and remove us from the situation by insisting we enter the restaurant we happened to be passing. When I explained to him what had just transpired, he was in complete disbelief at how easily he had been tricked. The whole thing surprised me because my dad was the one objecting to our exploring the south of Italy the entire trip because of the crime and poverty!
Even with him expecting we were going to have such problems he didn't catch it. A previous version of my father would have not only seen it coming, he likely would have escalated it with violence, he's a gruff old Italian sailor. This was like taking candy from a child.
It's incredible how much people change in old age.
In regards to this topic, the "gullible" line of thought misses the forest for the trees, because it still operates in the mode of "it was your personal responsibility [to not be scammed], and if you were, it is because you were gullible." This means the elderly are particularly vulnerable, as per your account, but it also means that there's less inclination to push for change and protection against scams like this from the general public in America. (I feel that in other cultures, such as Japan, the elderly tend to be regarded with respect for their wisdom rather than derision of their "regressing" minds).
My anecdotal story to the contrary of yours: I have a friend who graduated from a top 10 US college a few years ago and couldn't find a job. Right when they were desperately filing for applications and feeling very worried about their future (as recent college graduates are wont to do), this person received a call from 911 that fell exactly into this class:
>Impersonations of government employees accounted for ~60% of these cases.
The "911" was from the local police department of the city where they lived. The person was told that a warrant for their arrest has been issued - that 3 years before, there was a particular document to be filed with the IRS that had to declare all scholarship money awarded for a particular scholarship, and according to their documents, that document is three years overdue and has already incurred $700 in fines. The amount of time elapsed since the due date warranted x many jail days without immediate payment, and a mark on the criminal record... additionally, since this involves defrauding the government, their freshly minted university degree was about to be revoked.
My friend is an immigrant. They didn't know that university degrees couldn't be revoked, nor that no such thing as "government vouchers" bought from a grocery store existed (this was the trick - when the person arrives looking for the vouchers at Target or Office Depot, the agent on the phone says that some gift card can be an acceptable form of payment instead).
I took note of this scam both because of how elaborate it was, how believable it was (especially to someone less than familiar with the US government), how the person on the "911" call used psychological tactics to continue to make this vulnerable person more and more panicked about their future particularly at a time when they were already financially insecure. My friend was not gullible. But my friend did fear repercussions from the US government enough to completely fall for this scam.
This worked because you can actually buy government revenue vouchers or stamps to pay for official fees or transactions in many countries. I could definitely see this being believable to someone coming from a country where this is a thing.
I can't agree with this more. My parents and my in-laws have, within the last year or two, appeared to age a decade. Not in how they look, but how they behave; the things they struggle with, the things they obsess over, the logic they miss.
The scary thing in noticing this, is knowing that it will happen to me (us all) one day. I'm hoping that by noticing it I can stave it off for as long as possible, but maybe that kind of thinking means I'm already on the track...
This is so true. Back in the 90's my father was president of the local law society and the managing partner of a sizable law firm. He had a very sharp and enquiring mind.
He's now retired, in his late 70s and beginning to show signs of age related dementia.
Last year he fell for a phone scam from someone claiming to be his ISP, where he was persuaded to install remote desktop software onto his computer and login to internet banking. The scammers weaved a tale about fixing his computer and sending him an "authorisation code" which was actually the SMS code from his bank as they'd added themselves as a new payee. He simply read it out to them.
The scammers transferred just under $10,000 to their account.
Luckily, they'd set off enough red flags that he called me asking why his ISP wanted to know what bank he was with. Once we worked out what had happened we called the bank straight away and were able to get the transfer stopped by the bank just in time. It was a Saturday and he was literally saved by the weekend. Very lucky.
Turns out he was in the process of changing ISPs when the call arrived, so a garden variety phone scam was perfectly targetted.
With my 72 year old dad I mostly notice tech related things. He's a smart guy, worked in banking and finance his whole career (so used computers pretty heavily) and was really into PCs in the 90s. He was constantly setting up and tinkering with DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, etc. as well as learning to program.
These days he is limited to the basics on his PC: email in outlook, checkbook in Quicken, basic web browsing... and he often runs into trouble with them. I'm on TeamViewer about once a month helping with something. He also has an iPhone and iPad but can just barely do the basics on them, watching him try to use them is just painful. Some of that is due to crappy modern UX, especially on the iDevices, but his ability solve tech problems and deal with unexpected situations has dropped off a cliff the last few years. Age is coming for us all...
Your dad was not a gullible man.
My dad was a very aggressive and assertive person throughout his life, didn't trust anyone, lived through some very hard times like post-war Italy where apparently even the feral cats vanished for lack of food.
Then in retirement it's like everything experienced which conditioned him to be that way just faded away. His edge dulled substantially.
The last time I traveled with him we were approached by someone on the streets of Palermo who was obviously (to me) sizing us up. Within minutes of talking with this total stranger my dad had revealed where both his money and passport were kept on his person. I had to abruptly intervene and remove us from the situation by insisting we enter the restaurant we happened to be passing. When I explained to him what had just transpired, he was in complete disbelief at how easily he had been tricked. The whole thing surprised me because my dad was the one objecting to our exploring the south of Italy the entire trip because of the crime and poverty!
Even with him expecting we were going to have such problems he didn't catch it. A previous version of my father would have not only seen it coming, he likely would have escalated it with violence, he's a gruff old Italian sailor. This was like taking candy from a child.
It's incredible how much people change in old age.