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Comment by dbmajorkey | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago, my grandmother got a call one day saying that I was hurt badly and needed money. That I was afraid to contact my parents because I had been doing something I shouldn't have, and all my grandmother needed to do was send money to this hospital, which was just some scammers fake information.

I hate scammers. The idea that now you will be able to create videos, that interact and respond to questions, as if there is a real "grandson" on the other end of the video call is disturbing. I don't know how we deal with that.

Legit question... how do we deal with that?

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Instruct (pun not intended) your relatives to always hang up and call you back and use something from your past as a test. Some story from your life that is family-only knowledge. And explain that you aren’t the type who gets into “money situations”, and that in general “money from relatives now, or else” is not how even the less legal part of the world works.

[Grand]parents take it seriously because they don’t usually know anything about these extremities to counter the scammer pressure. Information is fortification.

Also add them to do-not-disturb bypass list if not yet.

Educate. Make up some kind of information that is easy for legit persons to exchange but difficult to look up online. In case of parents/grandparents, it can be information in their life which isn't available online (good luck finding the town my mother was born in online!).

We use this in our family for generations - anyone ringing our doorbell and asking to be let in needed to know the full name of my siblings. We have a similar mechanism in place for our kids.

Would it make sense for scammers to bother doing the research needed for that? The scam works by itself without those things. My grandmother has gotten that call many times and they can't even be bothered to figure out the names of any of the grandkids. Learning the likenesses and collecting voice information is a whole different animal.

The type of attack you're concerned with doesn't scale. The scammers would first have to collect your likeness to use to make the video or audio.

It _would_ work for the more targeted attacks. People will have to establish passphrases.

Passphrases probably don't work well with the target demographic that most needs it (elderly people). Maybe teach teach them to verify through another channel instead. I.e, hang up and call back at the number you usually use. That's what we just implemented at my company. If one of our CXO's (video) calls or writes to authorize a transfer of funds, then politely say you will, hang up, and call back the CXO in question at their regular number to verify.

You could probably be visiting your grandparents and physically stand right in front of them when the scammers call and pretend to be you, and the grandparents would still believe the scammers more than they believed you. Elderly people have an eery respect and reverence for telephones and letters.

This scam has been around far longer than deepfake audio/video.

~20 years ago my grandparents were close to sending money to someone claiming to be my cousin asking for bail to get out of jail.

Keep anything that can copy your identity from the open web, especially socials.

Only use services that have privacy in mind.

Educate your family on how to check for these things, like asking personal questions, or having a safe phrase.

If only this advice had been available 20 years ago. Instead, everyone volunteered that information up taking quizzes asking the name of the street you grew up on, the name of your first pet, and the details about your first car.

Oh, wait, that advice had been around for years before the internet even, but for whatever reason people collectively lost all reason when social media came around and just did the dumbest things.

“Nah, man, you’re just paranoid!”

My buddy recently learned about AI, something clicked in his mind (not sure what) and he absolutely seriously asked me to delete his everything from the internet. Who’s paranoid now.

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