There are tools that can be used. On iPhones there is a function that will allow you to effectively send any calls that are not on your contacts list to voicemail. Your phone won’t ring for the call. Automatically. Basically your contacts become a white list.
Otherwise, we can expand awareness and watch those who are vulnerable. AARP is doing some stuff along these lines.
Laws seem to be several steps behind the scam, so I don’t see much point in spending time chasing that as the fix.
what upsets me is the total lack of acknowledgement of this issue by the politicians. Most politicians in the EU and US are focused on "privacy", as if I give a fuck what Facebook / Google / Amazon does with my data when my family and I are assaulted on a daily basis by scammers via the phone and email.
The solutions are there, and can be adopted if there was even a threat of legal action by lawmakers.
All the lawmakers need to do is require telecommunication companies to offer free whitelist capabilities to all users regardless of device, for free. My relative's landline on Ooma has such feature but you have to pay $99 per year for the premium features. I don't consider that a premium feature...I consider it an essential feature. There is finally the TRACE legislation that allows shaken/STIR authentication finally passing but should have been done a long time ago, and it's only for mobile phone numbers, leaving older people who have landlines vulnerable.
For emails, there needs to be wider acknowledgement of the complete inadequacy of the open, shitty email systems we have today. Even mortgage / finance professionals don't understand how insecure it is, with many mortgage brokers asking for your confidential data like social security #, paycheck info, etc via email. I can't count the number of times I've had to explain to those idiots that email is not encrypted, and all content passes through 3rd party servers openly that anyone could gain access to and exploit. I've had healthcare brokers for small businesses use email systems like yahoo that were hacked and gained access to all employee and their family data. Electronic faxes is no better, with the confidential fax being converted to plain email and sent to the receiver with zero encryption.
There needs to be legislation to mandate encryption of emails, secure certificates to authenticate senders like banks, credit card companies, finance institutions, government institutions, and even individuals who have the potential to sway financial decisions one way or another. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but can go a great length to kill off the easy scams that are fooling a lot of people out of money.
We need to make it more costly and harder for crooks to fool our vulnerable population. Right now our telecommunications and email systems have zero security, and yet people don't fully understand the security implications and are losing billions. The texas school district lost $2.3m to a phishing scam. People are losing money wiring wrong funds to the crooks who pretend to be escrow companies / realtors.
This is not just an elderly problem, this is a fundamental societal problem. We used to be able to authenticate face to face, or at least with a physical piece of mail that took a lot of work / time for crooks to try to imitate. Electronic communication system remove this barrier for crooks and our lawmakers and population don't understand this and tackle this head-on.
Seeing the EU and California adopt "consumer privacy" laws is a farce. They are avoiding the real legislation to help real people losing their life savings and businesses going broke thanks to insecure communication systems. It is a real tragedy and we need people to be more aware and demanding of action.