what is vishing and why is nobody warning older parents about it?
I need to vent about this because I'm STILL shaken from what happened to my mom last week… I'm 41, my mom is 68, lives alone, she called me crying asking me what is vishing because she'd almost been scammed out of $4,000. She got a phone call from someone claiming to be from her bank saying there was "suspicious activity" on her account and they needed to verify her information immediately to stop the fraud. The caller ID literally showed her bank's actual name and phone number. The person on the line knew her name, the last four digits of her account, and even mentioned a recent purchase she'd made at Target.
She was THIS close to giving them the verification code that came to her phone (which would have let them into her actual account) when something felt off and she hung up. Thank god. But she was a mess afterward and I spent two hours on the phone with her trying to explain that this is a real thing that happens to people every single day now.
So I researched what is vishing and how widespread it's become, and I'm horrified. seems like voice phishing scams have exploded in the past year, and with AI voice cloning getting so good, scammers can now imitate specific people's voices from like 30 seconds of audio from their social media. There's a whole growing industry of criminals running these vishing operations and our parents have no idea.
nobody is actually warning older adults about this in a way they'll understand. My mom knew about email phishing (we drilled that into her years ago) and she knows not to click sketchy links. But what is vishing in a practical sense? Nobody told her that phone numbers can be spoofed to look like her real bank. Nobody told her that the "verify your identity" language is the giveaway. Nobody told her that legitimate banks will literally NEVER ask for verification codes over the phone.
I tried to talk to her about it and even she said that the caller ID showed my bank, how was I supposed to know? And she has a point. The technology that lets scammers do this is way ahead of what most people understand is even possible.
I've been trying to figure out how to protect her going forward. I told her to hang up on any call about her accounts and call the bank back directly using the number on her card. I'm thinking about getting her one of those call screening services, but I don't know which ones actually work versus which ones are just another way to harvest data themselves (the irony). And I'm now paranoid about my own dad, my in laws, my aunts and uncles... basically every older person I love.
what is vishing protection actually supposed to look like for older adults who aren't tech savvy? Is there a realistic way to safeguard them without just hoping their gut tells them something is off, like my mom's did? Because we got lucky once and I don't want to count on luck a second time...