With regard to personal scams: Anyone with elderly relatives will know the amount of scamming that they are often targeted with. My parents regularly received calls from purported Microsoft call centres that try to get them to install trojan software. The calls even have callcenter background noise.
Other relatives of mine were targeted with the 'grandparent' trick, where someone claims that they are a relative or grandchild in need with all sorts of tricks to get more information out of them (when you ask 'who is this', they will say 'of course you know') by exploiting fears of forgetfulness.
All these types of scams can now be automated and targeted towards a broader public with higher barriers of distrust and different emotional triggers. Just imagine someone cloning your voice and calling your children or you receiving a call with the voice of your child. Emotional buttons are pushed that can beat any preparations such as arranged keywords.
For these types of attack, training is not really sufficient. We also need regulation and new solutions for protection.
To avoid getting scammed never answer any call or engage with any email you don't expect. As a bonus, ignore anyone at your front door you did not invite
It is absolutely ridiculous that we've surrendered a genuinely incredibly useful contact method because of our unwillingness to address this malicious use of it.
Last year I missed an emergency call from a friend, that I was partially expecting. The call was from their caretaker's phone and I didn't have the number in my contacts, so I ignored it. They didn't die that time but they could have, and I wouldn't have been there.
Ignoring calls is simply not an appropriate solution to this. There are no appropriate individual solutions to any systemic problem, including this one.
What’s helped me a lot is that my phone number is from a different area code than the one I currently live at. So if it’s a local number I know it’s probably legit and if it’s from my phone’s area code I know it’s a scammer.
To add to that SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other messaging apps are also frequently used by scammers.
Oh and in the United States at least, most government agencies will contact you by postal mail if you owe them payment and none of them accept gift cards or bitcoin.
It's great how we just let bad actors ruin every kind of mass communication service because not-securing them is more profitable for the businesses that operate them.
Good luck. Our politicians even if they can be made to give a shit have such a dearth of knowledge of anything tech related that it's pulling teeth to even get across what "spoofing" means in this context. And then you have all the ones that are just in the back pocket of the big telecos and pollute the discourse in the halls of power in exchange for money.
