Elderly in the Age of Tech

The risks of naïveté

My mother died almost exactly a year ago, and my mother-in-law died about eighteen months before that. And just one year prior my father-in-law had died. We had been caring for our aging parents for over a decade before, one by one, they all passed away over a period of just three years. Poof! They were all suddenly gone. By the end of that three years we were on a first-name basis with our local funeral home director.

Several years before my father-in-law died, he received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. But while he clearly had dementia, it did not proceed along a normal Alzheimer’s trajectory. Maybe it was Alzheimer’s and maybe it was something else. We’ll never know.

Our moms, who both lived into their late eighties, exhibited their own mental declines, though it never really developed to the point where they were debilitated. It mostly took the form of persistent forgetfulness, an inability to learn new things, and an increase in what might be described as naïve trust. It was the naïve trust that was most worrisome, truth be told.

The moms were just not alert to the possibility of being exploited. Nowhere were they more vulnerable than where their use of tech was concerned. They faced a continual stream of scammer calls and phishing attempts. Nothing we could say or coach them about ever found its way into their day-to-day responses.

Here’s a typical story. I got a call from my mother-in-law around 6:00 one Friday evening. She informed me that she needed to withdraw $5000 from the bank and I was not to ask her why. Well, I immediately asked her why. She, of course, would not tell me. But she assured me it was urgent that she put her hands on $5000 in cash right now. The only reason she was calling me about it was because the banks were closed and she was unable to withdraw that much money using her ATM card.

The backstory to her need for $5000 - what she was unwilling to tell me in the moment - was that she had received a phone call that afternoon from a man claiming to be a lawyer in another city. The man had informed her that her 18-year-old grandson had been arrested, and the caller claimed to be a defense attorney representing her grandson. The grandson, the caller alleged, was afraid to ask his parents for help and had instructed the lawyer to call his grandmother. The “lawyer” told my mother-in-law that if she sent $5000 in cash, it would cover all of the costs associated with getting her grandson out of jail, including the cost of having the charges dismissed. The “lawyer” swore my mother-in-law to secrecy regarding the situation. All for the benefit of her “grandson”, of course. Notwithstanding the implausibility of the story in light of the kind of person she knew her grandson to be, my mother-in-law was immediately convinced that the crisis was real and she resolved to intervene to “save” her grandson.

Ultimately, what prevented her from being scammed out of $5000 was not her situational awareness, but her conscience. Try as she might, her conscience would not let her deceive her grandson’s parents by going behind their backs about such an important issue. So she went to their house, sat down with them, and through tears, she asked them if they knew where their son was right that very minute. Puzzled, they replied, “Yes, mom, he’s in his bedroom down the hall.” At which point the scales fell from her eyes. She was shocked when she realized how close she had just come to being scammed out of thousands of dollars.

Whatever the cause, what my wife and I observed in both of our aging moms was a steady decline in their ability to assess the intentions of other people, especially when their experience of those people was mediated through one or more layers of tech.

In a plot-line twist that might give the reader a feeling of whiplash, I want to mention here that a friend of mine and I own a tiny little phone company. It’s not a normal phone company. It’s entirely devoted to introducing smartphone features that the carriers don’t provide, and at a fraction of the cost you would pay if you could get them from a major carrier. On our service, you can acquire, in a matter of seconds, as many phone numbers for a single smartphone as you want. You can cause a number to ring on multiple cell phones - like extensions on a land line. Using a single number, a caller can be routed to different phones based on menu options that you yourself create. (e.g. “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 for tech support…”) There are many different features.

Our phone company is fully automated and runs completely lights out - no humans required. The lights-out-no-humans-required part is because I have a day job and I hate working nights and weekends. In creating these phone services, I wasn’t wanting to add to my regular work load. My friend and I built this little business mostly for our own amusement and as kind of a hobby. We’ve never really promoted it - we both hate doing marketing - but we have built up a community of subscribers over time whose monthly subscription fees allows us to “clear the housekeeping”, as the British would say. The phone company is kind of like a perpetual self-licking ice cream cone in that regard. We’re not making any money to speak of, but we’re no longer having to feed it either. It’s self-sustainable. And anyway, our phones now do things we wanted them to do, but which the carriers wouldn’t provide. But I digress.

One of the things about having your own phone company is that you have a front row seat at the machinations of scammers. As it happens, my friend and I share similar experiences where caring for aging parents is concerned. And over the years, our little phone company has been able to collect some actual data related to scammers’ nefarious schemes. The amount of creative ingenuity scammers apply to how they go about cheating people is a wonder to behold. Truly.

Smartphones are a primary attack vector for preying on unwary elderly people. And this is where the plot twist about my owning a phone company comes in. We are contemplating adding a new feature to our service that will leverage AI to provide automated scammer detection. It would be an opt-in feature. Our thought is to have AI process text messages and call recordings and grade them for the probability of a scammer being involved. If the AI detects potential scammer activity (e.g. phishing links in text messages, recorded conversations in which someone is asking for money, or solicitation of other sensitive data, like social security numbers, account numbers, etc.) we would notify caregivers via multiple avenues to let them know about the potential scamming activity.

Imagine you are a caregiver for an elderly parent. This capability would let you be notified if anyone calls or texts your aging parent and, in the ensuing conversation, the discussion covers how the aging parent can send the caller money. That’s the kind of capability it is possible to automate now.

This weekend, I have been working on the beginnings of a prototype of this capability. But it occurred to me that I could take an informal poll and perhaps get an initial reaction to this idea. I’ve never used the Substack poll widget in a post before, so this seemed like a good opportunity. As it happens, I’m sitting here waiting on a long-running audio transcription job to complete. So I took the time to hammer out these thoughts while I was waiting.

The poll is below. I would love to have feedback from any reader who is willing to provide it. I am really just trying to garner an informal sense for whether people are generally aware of the risks facing the elderly where tech is concerned and whether that awareness translates into any interest in doing something about it.

Many thanks.