A looming problem with shifts in demographics and family structure is that many people will be slipping into cognitive decline without a formal transition to address their incompetence. Sadly, there is a point where the older person really needs to permanently delegate important decision-making to a trusted third party. They should no longer be legally empowered to authorize funds transfers, sign contracts, or even make medical decisions.

We're not really setup to handle this well. Not at the systemic level of protecting people from themselves, and not at the personal level of relinquishing control over our own lives. So we often have to let the sufferer fumble along and cause a lot of damage before the protections eventually kick in.

And, ironically, these protection mechanisms can also be corrupted into another scam and form of abuse. To totally de-risk would require some kind of time travel or perfect foresight. But in the real world, the damage is often not fully reversible when it is detected after the fact.

1) voice one: young adult calls, sobbing 2) grandparent inquires with a name... "Ben, is that you?" 3) voice one: "Yes grandma, it's me, Ben... I'm in trouble, please don't tell mom 4) voice two: "Hello, I'm attorney..."

My grandmother fell victim to this almost 20 years ago, which only stopped when Western Union refused to let her continue sending wires... she was forced to call her daughter (at which point they just called my brother.)

Our takeaway (at the time)... the voice doesn't even need to be terribly accurate, since the original interaction is brief / somewhat inaudible over the tears. Typically just requires an older vulnerable adult, a lucky strike with the initial setup (e.g. grandparent actually has a grandkid), and a lot of high pressure / duress salesmanship.

2021 - "Despite the prevalence of deepfake audio tech, banks and ISPs rush ahead with “voice print” authentication" https://keydiscussions.com/2021/12/07/despite-the-prevalence... ends with a section called "The next crisis: robocalls that spoof the voices of victims at scale"

Talking on the phone is now an unmitigated liability.

> Every article published on SmarterArticles is authored and editorially controlled by Tim Green. Artificial intelligence tools are used within a structured and supervised workflow as research and drafting instruments. All arguments, framing decisions, source selections, and final publication choices remain human-directed and under my full responsibility.

There are references at the bottom, but I would have preferred direct links or footnotes within the article. Also, direct quotes are nice. I didn’t notice any glaring AI cliches.

The attackers created AI-generated video and audio replicas of the CFO and other executives of the global engineering firm. These deepfakes were deployed in a live video call – not as a pre-recorded video, but as a real-time conference with multiple participants. The finance employee saw and heard his superiors in what appeared to be a normal conference situation. The instructions came through clearly and consistently. Urgency was created by framing the situation as a supposed corporate acquisition. Within a single session, he approved 15 individual transfers to various accounts in Hong Kong.[1] That fraud yielded US$25 million.

[1] https://www.securitytoday.de/en/2026/04/04/deepfake-attacks-...

Not saying that "there's nothing we can do" or anything, but it does feel like this is one of those instincts that you develop growing up with the internet. Like, my first instinct reading that (and I hope getting that call) would be "what the hell is the lawyer doing at the scene". You have to treat _everything_ coming through your phone as potentially untrusted. I don't have any data on this, but it feels like my friends, and especially younger people, do that automatically.

The primary defence against all phishing is to tell yourself: nothing is ever really that urgent. Nothing is ever that good.

I think it is a standard script now. Call comes from police department. 'Your son hit a pregnant woman. He is about to be booked. You need to pay $$$$ yada yada'. With an authentic sounding voice conversation from their son.

In spite of several red flags (in hindsight) they withdrew $15K from bank, and somehow at the last minute pulled back.

Edit: Scammers know how to push the right buttons.

Would have come in handy when our niece was traveling in Asia and asked for money a few times, but in this case it wasn't a scam.

I got no traction with it, which I was a bit surprised by because one of the family members works at the Puzzle Palace.

As the cost goes down to near-zero you can scale it up almost infinitely, especially if the profits are high enough to get some smart people working on the problem, which going by the article is already the case ("INTERPOL's finding that AI-enhanced fraud is four and a half times more profitable than the traditional kind"; incidents rose by 26% last year). If AI does succeed on mutilating white collar work enough there will be a large supply of knowledge workers that might just join International Scam Co. rather than have their families go homeless. Drowning man clutching at straw and all.

So if technologically it's impossible to prevent and societally it's impossible to prevent (like the attorney that got pwned same as the grandma), I'm not sure if there exists an answer that isn't worse than the thing it's supposed to prevent. I suppose we'll soon be in a situation where nothing we don't directly perceive in real life is provably true. That journalism and media in general seem to be in a deep crisis of trustworthiness means that you won't even get the benefit of the chain-of-trust as a proxy for whether something is or isn't real.

Ignoring everything happening outside of your immediate surroundings is a choice, and probably even good for people's mental health, but my gut feeling is that it does make humanity as a whole dumber and disempowered. What does corruption matter if nobody cares, or even hears about it? It was AI generated by $current_enemy anyway; nothing to see here, citizen.

Now other businesses are starting to reference their privacy policy at the beginning of a call, which leads me to think there are many more uses popping up for our recorded voice.

I'm sure a certain percentages of recordings of our voice "to stop fraud" might be used to start fraud.

i guess even local models can do this now, especially in non-interactive mode.

so, i have a hard time reading this part as mere naivitee, as opposed to enemy propaganda in support of mandatory digital ID's for everything. or for straight out criminalizing "unauthorized" compute altogether?

Long story short, some fraud associated events cropped up last year at work and I was concerned about my mom getting scammed, so we kitchen tabled it and I told her flat out will never ever call you asking for money" and walked her through some quick scenarios and left it there.

About 5 months later, someone called literally screaming, pretending to be me having just gotten into a car accident and killing a pregnant woman, then the phone transferred over to a 'lawyer' and she ended up getting scammed out of most of her life savings.

It sat really poorly with me, so I quit my dayjob at the end of last year and started silversight.ai to solve the ai scam / fraud problem for b2b, but I’ve been wanting to roll out something for regular people from the beginning. This post was the bump I needed to validate that other people were feeling the pressure.

So thanks for posting.

We have more features in the pipe, but as of today dontscamgrandma is backed by an engine that does regular recurring real time phone based training scenarios with an AI that roleplay's common grandparent scams with your loved one with the goal of getting them to recognize and defend themselves from sketchy calls.

Pretty excited to share it. Feedback welcomed https://dontscamgrandma.com

This doesn’t make any sense. At some point they will speak to their child and learn that the call wasn’t real.

Another pillar of basic trust that's being eroded on an industrial scale. Sigh.

Inspired by this headline I saw in the news today... haven't read the full article yet: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/now-defenders-are-e...

It should be illegal to "impersonate" a human voice.

Uh? Surely this makes believing the victims easy not hard to believe.

Its like revenge porn. "It's not me. It's a deepfake" is easy to believe.

When I told my parents some of what happened to me in my career, initially, I don't think they fully believed me because people in my stories behaved so differently than they're used to. My parents lived in an environment where they could expect reciprocity and money wasn't so difficult to come by that it would be worth risking prison time.

I kind of believe that a lot of people are essentially forced into fraud. I don't believe that they are necessarily bad people. A lot of people are just trying to get by.

So it's very important to convey to family members what kind of world we live in. I think most of my family members are essentially conspiracy theorists now.

Heavy sigh. The “weapon” is software. It cannot be regulated unless we live in the fascist dystopia where I have to ask the governments approval to run any piece of software.