Have luddite grandparents who would refuse to pay their taxes with anything but a handwritten check on general principle, and who wouldn’t have been able to work a Bitcoin ATM even if you were right there with them literally pointing at things and telling them what to do.

It also helps that they’re dead.

My parents are getting up in their years though. My mom’s still sharp as a tack and decently good with tech. She doesn’t exactly fully understand AI, but she’s aware of it and has a general ideas of what it can do, so I’m pretty confident her bullshit detectors can fill in the gaps from there.

And my dad… well he has my mom around. Probably about 20 years ago he was just about ready to give information to some scammer claiming to be from Apple tech support

Despite the fact that we owned no apple products.

Don’t upload photos/videos/voice recordings of yourself to the internet, ever. This alone won’t guarantee your likeness and voice can’t be replicated with AI since there could always be photos/videos/voice recordings of you out there that you’re not aware of (from a data leak, etc) but it will significantly reduce your attack surface. Unless you’re rich or otherwise high profile, scammers are most likely not targeting you specifically but just scraping the internet for training data and picking targets based on who they have the most video/audio of and can therefore produce the most convincing AI fakes of. Or buying from data brokers who have scraped the internet for them. I could be wrong, but I doubt there are many scammers going to the effort of buying/stealing, say, call recordings from your phone company or virtual meeting provider to scam some random person without much wealth.

Oh, and never link to your IRL friends and family online. Never add them on Facebook (just never use Facebook tbh), or Discord, or anywhere else that’s not E2EE. Scammers can’t target your grandparents if they have no idea who they even are.

Codeword/phrase

Establish a specific trusted channel of communication and a backup. Anything important must come through those instead of just any random source. Educate them on scams in general and if they aren’t on social media already, keep them away from it.

Especially if cognitive decline hasn’t set in yet, also encourage them to make healthier lifestyle choices, take preventative measures, get checked up, and perhaps even get hearing aids to keep their minds sharp for some more years.

I’ve personally provided them a locked-down device that only connects to my aforementioned trusted communication channels.

Unfortunately you can’t protect your grandparents if you’re not around the 24/7

Make sure their email has a spam filter. Have a discussion with them about what’s possible today, about the different types of scams.

As far as financial scams go, my parents and uncles handled my grandparents’ finances for their last decade. If they were targeted then there would be an upper limit to how much money they could lose in one scam. They also weren’t paying for things online.

As for younger elderly people, if they’re still smart enough for it then I’d try educating them. Practically, not just talking about it. There are plenty of good public interactive resources for phishing training, so I’d be surprised if there weren’t any for AI. Also simple things like “never pay for anything in gift cards, ever” are some easy wins.

Throw away their phones, bolt down the front door.

Better yet, bury them to just make sure no one can reach them

On a serious note though: keep telling them, over and over, never to trust anything or anyone. They hear your voice over the phone unexpectedly? Ask for a code word that only the two of you know. No code word? AI scammer. Don’t trust any email you didn’t request yourself, always verify the sender that it’s the right email address. Never trust any SMS messages . Banks don’t ever call you.

Then also remember that in the end they’ll probably fail here and there because good scams are extremely hard to detect and avoid.

Tell them to spend all their money. the health insurance corporations will take it all anyways

i sometimes worry when i’ll pass the threshold of cognitive decline such that these scammers will be able to get anything from me; but then i remember that i have no assets/savings for them to take from me and that i’ll very likely follow in my parent’s & grandparent’s foot steps and be dead before i reach 70 years old y se me pasa.

Rob them yourself.

Jokes aside: they are mostly dead so pretty safe no one takes anything from them. One still lives but doesn’t use anything but the phone. Once shouted at a poor lady calling her because she thought it’d be a scam ^^ pretty safe but you can never be safe enough of course

All my grandparents save one have passed on, and I have no actual relationship with the one that still lives. So I’m not terribly concerned about her, beyond how much I care for any other random senior citizen.

To answer the spirit of the question, though we can talk about my parents, who are grandparents now.

Both are educated and about as tech proficient as I am. However, my mom nearly got caught in a gift card scam a few years ago, where someone was posing as one of her friends. She had even bought the cards, but insisted on going to give them in-person, which exposed the scam.

Because of that, I think my parents are actually pretty safe, as they are now extra vigilant about the messages they receive, and know to follow up anything suspicious using an alternate communication method.

I know, “once bitten twice shy,” isn’t the best defence, but alternate communication methods are. Stress to your loved ones that if they ever recieve a message from someone asking for money, to follow up using a different medium.

Cooperation is the secret.

If anyone thinks about trying something, setup a private meeting with them.

I’ve heard that quiet publication of the results of that meeting (whatever you choose to make those results) can be a great deterrent to others with similar ideas.

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