The thing that got me with this is that it somehow went from “I’ve got a $3,000 bill I need to pay” to her transferring $10,000. Is my family weird, or is that something that most people would just do? I mean, even taking out the whole scam bit, do people actually just hand out that type of money without a serious conversation about what exactly is going on? I’d be really worried that there was some sort of gambling or drug problem behind something like that, I’d be dropping everything to make real contact and figure out what’s going on.
She’s 83. I know one of my grandmothers, who is in her mid-80s and lives alone, is constantly trying to offload her savings to the rest of the family because she doesn’t want to spend it on herself. Her children keep telling her to keep the money, but she refuses to listen. Maybe there is a similar thing going on here.
I could well be. All of these scams seem to prey on some sort of anxiety, and often on people trying to do the right thing.
I wonder how much we could reduce scams if we focussed on helping people with managing finances and dealing with financial systems, instead of focusing on “personal responsibility”. It seems like scams used to focus on greedy people looking for a get rich quick scheme, now they target people who are just trying to manage day to day, and with all of the changes we’ve made to how things work it’s not easy to keep up.
There definitely needs to be some sort of ongoing and widespread education initiative in place to help people protect themselves. Relying on companies and/or governments to function perfectly, or blaming victims who are extremely vulnerable through no fault of their own, doesn’t work. As long as Australians don’t understand how anything works or the risks associated with what they are doing, they will continue to fall victim to scams, data breaches, identity theft, etc. It’s actually painful when I watch other people use a web browser and they don’t even know how to install an ad-blocker. Just the absolute basics like that are completely beyond the average person.
The thing that got me with this is that it somehow went from “I’ve got a $3,000 bill I need to pay” to her transferring $10,000. Is my family weird, or is that something that most people would just do? I mean, even taking out the whole scam bit, do people actually just hand out that type of money without a serious conversation about what exactly is going on? I’d be really worried that there was some sort of gambling or drug problem behind something like that, I’d be dropping everything to make real contact and figure out what’s going on.
She’s 83. I know one of my grandmothers, who is in her mid-80s and lives alone, is constantly trying to offload her savings to the rest of the family because she doesn’t want to spend it on herself. Her children keep telling her to keep the money, but she refuses to listen. Maybe there is a similar thing going on here.
I could well be. All of these scams seem to prey on some sort of anxiety, and often on people trying to do the right thing.
I wonder how much we could reduce scams if we focussed on helping people with managing finances and dealing with financial systems, instead of focusing on “personal responsibility”. It seems like scams used to focus on greedy people looking for a get rich quick scheme, now they target people who are just trying to manage day to day, and with all of the changes we’ve made to how things work it’s not easy to keep up.
There definitely needs to be some sort of ongoing and widespread education initiative in place to help people protect themselves. Relying on companies and/or governments to function perfectly, or blaming victims who are extremely vulnerable through no fault of their own, doesn’t work. As long as Australians don’t understand how anything works or the risks associated with what they are doing, they will continue to fall victim to scams, data breaches, identity theft, etc. It’s actually painful when I watch other people use a web browser and they don’t even know how to install an ad-blocker. Just the absolute basics like that are completely beyond the average person.