Culling of the Grandparents: The Urgency of Helping Older Generations Navigate AI

This week I opted to write about what I feel is another important topic that I think is largely ignored, and certainly under-talked about. At face value, scams targeting the elderly might not feel sexy or exciting to read about, but it’s a topic of extreme relevance given some of the recent advancements in AI, and one that is increasingly likely to impact families in the coming years.

A couple weeks ago I got a phone call from my grandfather.

He wanted to tell me about a scam call he had just received. The caller was posing as my (recently dead) uncle, and requesting urgent money saying he was in trouble. Fortunately my grandfather is savvy, and didn’t fall for the scam (it certainly helps when the caller poses as a dead person). However, while there is a little (dark) humor to be found in the scammer's target selection, the unfortunate reality is that this is not the first of these calls he has received, and certainly won’t be the last.

I think it’s not talked about enough just how common scams on the elderly are.

My grandfather has received a number of calls now from supposed “family members”, myself included, with dramatic stories and urgent crises all requiring urgent payments from him. My family is fortunate that at 89, and as a former lawyer and class president at Stanford who enjoys keeping up with technology, he is still extremely capable, worldly, up to date, and hard to fool. However, the same cannot be said for my other grandparents, and a lot of other elderly people.?

A number of months ago, my aunt told the family about her mother (not my grandma) receiving a phone call from one of her grandchildren, or at least who she thought was one of her grandchildren. The deepfaked voice over the phone asking for money sounded exactly like the one she recognized from years of babysitting, family get-togethers, and holidays. Unlike my grandfather, she wasn’t able to identify it as a scam, and truly did believe that it was her grandson calling asking her for money. Luckily for the family, she wasn’t in a charitable mood, and told “her grandson” to go ask his parents for money instead. Crisis (narrowly) averted.

Unfortunately these experiences from my own personal life aren’t unique. A recent AARP study found that $28.3 billion is lost to elder fraud scams each year, most of which goes unreported.

I get that it can be uncomfortable to talk about the prevalence of scams targeting the elderly.?

When a scam is successful, outside of the financial loss, it can often feel deeply embarrassing for the individual and family affected. No one wants to feel like a fool, let alone publicly discuss how they were duped, but the resulting silence means that the problem festers and grows without being addressed properly, and without the support systems in place for people to navigate the aftermath of a scam.

Separately, discussing the prevalence and effectiveness of scams targeting the elderly requires admitting the following uncomfortable truths:

1. These scams are more common than we would like to believe
2. We (myself included) aren’t doing enough to help protect our elderly loved ones from scams and help keep them up to date on technology
3. Discussing scams with our older loved ones often means hard (and potentially offensive) conversations around acknowledging age and new weaknesses

As a result, most of us are content to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that this problem doesn’t exist, until it affects those close to us, and then we try really hard to pretend it didn’t happen and keep up the appearance that everything is fine. But is that really the best approach??

Why are the elderly targeted?

Taking a step back, when I look at my grandfather’s lifetime, and the sheer volume of rapid technological advancement, it’s no wonder that older generations can struggle to keep up with the latest in technology and can struggle to protect themselves.

My grandfather is 89. In his lifetime he has seen the development of: Nuclear weapons, transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, GPS, space exploration, the internet, personal computers, mobile phones, digital cameras, social media, crypto, and AI.

He has seen a world war, a cold war, the civil rights movement, the space race, the rise of the internet, 9/11, the war on terror, the dot com crash, the 08 housing crash, COVID lockdowns, the list goes on.

It’s incredible how far the world has come in his lifetime. It also makes sense how when his generation exited the workforce, it became harder for them to keep up with the pace of technological development. Staying up to date on the latest advancements could be seen as a chore, and with diminishing returns from adopting the new technologies in their personal lives, I understand why a lot of elderly people are content to stay out of the loop and rely on cable news to keep them up to date (a whole separate issue).

However, this doesn’t mean that the world has forgotten about them, or that new technologies won’t affect them. Whether intentional or not, falling behind in knowledge and awareness of the latest technology has led to a significant portion of this generation that has seen and accomplished so much, becoming extremely vulnerable to scams. Not because they are stupid, but because things are moving extremely fast, they are out of the loop, and often more isolated than we would care to admit. For malicious actors, this makes them prime targets.

So why am I talking about this?

Why is someone in their 20’s working in tech ranting about protecting the elderly? Because the world has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. Because AI is unlike anything they (we) have faced before. Because we are all like our grandparents when it comes to malicious use of AI, woefully uneducated on the subject, overconfident in our own abilities, and vulnerable.

When our voices can be stolen from any phone call, voicemail, recording, YouTube video, Tik Tok, Facebook video, Instagram reel, etc. we are all vulnerable, as are all of our loved ones who can be extorted when they believe we are in trouble. (Here is a great article from the New Yorker about this.)

So what can we do??

How do we help older generations navigate this new reality? How do we even begin to have these conversations?

I think it starts with laying out the facts.

1. Technology is advanced enough to where you can clone someone’s voice and speak as them. (Optional: Show them how this works using elevenlabs.io . Video demonstration here .)
2. Scammers are using this technology and “stealing voices”.
3. They are then calling family members using these stolen voices pretending that there is a kidnapping, car crash, or other emergency requiring urgent payment.
4. These calls are becoming more and more common.

Here are some practical steps you can then take to help protect them.

1. Educate them on the technology, its capabilities, and how it can be misused. Resources provided above.
2. Remind them of the importance of critical thinking, especially in scenarios where someone is in trouble and/or they are being asked to send money. What is being said? Why is it being said? Who is saying it? Am I sure it’s really that person? Do they have an agenda? Is this how I normally communicate with that individual? Is this type of behavior characteristic of them? Don’t just accept information at face value.?
3. Establish a code word to be used to confirm identity in times of crisis. Pineapple. Bureaucrat. Baseball. Fluffy. It doesn't matter what it is, but have one. If a code word is hard to remember or implement, have at least 3 personal questions in mind that can be asked to confirm the identity of the person you are speaking with. Drill home that before any money is sent, identity must be confirmed via a codeword or series of questions.
4. If they get a call from a family member in trouble asking for money, instruct them to hang up, then call the family member back themselves.?(Note if this scenario is a kidnapping or something similar, you can tell them to call the family member on another phone to reduce risks associated with hanging up. Probability wise though it’s far more likely it is a scam than a real kidnapping.)
5. Research available solutions for deepfake detection, scam prevention, and context analysis. Norton Genie is an available option for scam detection and context analysis, although it doesn’t work for calls yet. Scammerblock is a startup helping protect the elderly by blocking unknown numbers and requiring preliminary information for review before allowing contact.

Taking 5 minutes to have these conversations with your loved ones can make a huge difference.

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