I was going to post this in the On-Going Scams thread; but I really need suggestions for my specific situation.

I live in a different town than my parents (age 93 and 91). But I’m over there at least one day a week to help them with various things. Their phone rings nonstop (5 to 10 times per hour) and gets answered every time. I am appalled at some of the information they provide the callers. I have not heard them give out crucial information. But I’m not there for every call and I would not be surprised that quite a “file” has been created about them.

I’ve tried explaining the risks and dad doesn’t care. (My mom has dementia.)

I made sure their land line was on the Do Not Call list. It is and has been since 2003.

Dad hasn’t had a cell phone for quite some time. So I bought him a very basic cell phone and tried to get him to drop the land line. He won’t even consider that.

Just this week, dad called, with mom on the speaker phone, to ask if I just called asking for bail money. (At least he called to ask.) But hearing my voice, mom convinced dad that it wasn’t really me. I had to relate some of the things I’d done at their house the day before to convince him.

A couple of months ago he got a call saying he owned a fine (payable by gift card) for not showing up for jury duty. He got in the car (yes, he still drives… that’s a whole other subject) and went to the courthouse to pay the fine, which obviously didn’t exist. He chalked it up to a “mistake”.

So, on the one hand, dad still has some recognition of a possible scam. But on the other hand, he’s not entirely sure and I don’t know what else has transpired from phone calls.

What am I to do, if anything?

It is only a matter of time before they get scammed and lose money. Maybe Ooma, as it can ring in two places. They are at serious risk of loosing serious money and then also getting upset with themselves for being taken. They may even try to hide it from you from embarrassment.

Yes, nomorobo is a good start.

When my Dad moved into Assisted Living, he chose not have a phone there. He already had me taking care of his finances. Although he took his computer, it was ‘sans’ his account/logon book. Without a real phone, all his calls went to Voice Mail, which I could access remotely on-line. He had been a sucker for Vitamins/Supplements and it took a while to get those stopped. After that, my concern of him being taken advantage of went to zero.

OP – you need to stay on top of this. DW and I get crap calls or e-mails all the time. The hucksters are out there.

As an added note to all: When my Dad passed, his lawyer told me to be real cautious of hucksters claiming they were owed money.

bradinsky wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 5:50 pm
About 3 years ago I got really tired of hearing our landline phone ring. Seriously, it was about 100 times per day & all garbage calls. I dumped the number we had for 25 plus years & got anew one. For the first year after the change our phone never rang, ever. Now we are up to maybe 3 calls per day.

Same thing happens when you have an email address for a long time. Much more spam as well as people (I use the term loosely) trying to access the account.

bradinsky wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 5:50 pm
About 3 years ago I got really tired of hearing our landline phone ring. Seriously, it was about 100 times per day & all garbage calls. I dumped the number we had for 25 plus years & got anew one. For the first year after the change our phone never rang, ever. Now we are up to maybe 3 calls per day.

LOL. I dumped our landline the month after I retired – I could not believe how often it rang; at work I never knew, no messages left. Cancelled that, and now have only cell phones. I never ever answer the phone unless it’s a known friend (and mostly they text!). It’s annoying to me that theater subscriptions, donations to charity or political causes seem to come with a lifetime of solicitation. Not sure what you can do about your parents. Is it possible for them to have only one month’s living expenses in the checking account they can access, and every other dime (retirement, savings) in a separate brokerage account at a separate institution with 2FA and your phone? One sibling was a Vanguard Trusted Agent for our Mom, and just transferred her living money to her local checking account….

OP, you have my sympathy. With my parents, I was eventually able to convince them to never give out personal information — I think what helped was printing out newspaper articles and other ‘official looking’ web articles so they could see it in print — that seemed more convincing than anything their child tried to lecture them on .

But even after they stopped answering the 10 calls an hour, the calls continued. Eventually I helped them set up a block on their phone that blocks all calls except for numbers that we put into a whitelist. (I also made sure their doctors, etc, have my number as a backup contact in case they can’t reach my parents). Check with whoever is providing their landline to see if you can set up something similar. Or, consider switching their service to Ooma which does provide the ability to block all numbers that are not in the contact list.

Good luck, it’s terrible that our elders have to deal with this!

Edited to add: I don’t think my Mom really believed me when I assured her that her grandson *didn’t* call her from jail until I printed out an article that described that common scam!

Depending on your phone provider, you should be able to create a white list. What I do is setup a contact list of everyone who can contact your parent. Everyone else not on the list gets voice mail and if they really want to reach them, they can use the voice mail and you can review the message and see if they can be call them. Keep in mind that I do this for my young kid’s contacts. I don’t have to do this with my mom because she refuses to answer the phone for anyone whom she does not know.

This was done using an iphone, but you can also do it through OOMA. I implemented this when some weird Chinese telemarketer kept calling me every 10 minuites at a different number.

RetiredArtist wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 5:45 pm
I was in a similar situation. Is it even possible to allow only approved numbers to ring on a landline? On my iphone, I have to block junk calls, one by one, and the scammers & donation seekers change their numbers daily.

You can set your cell phone so that only numbers in your contact list ring through. Everything else goes directly to voicemail.

I get very few spam messages using that feature.

My MIL’s (late 80’s) checking and credit card accounts have been scammed/hacked a couple times. No serious financial damage so far. She refuses to make any changes to her habits.

But I’d try the answering machine mentioned above if your parents will allow it. Having my phine ringing that often would drive me insane.

MGBMartin wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 6:27 pm
I have an ATT answer machine that has a built in call blocker on my landline.
The best part of the device is the call blocker works without the phone ringing.
Basically the phone screens all incoming calls and if the call is from a number that is not in an allowed list it prompts the caller to state their name then press #. This trips up just about all spam calls as they don’t know how to respond.
Our usual class contacts are saved in the allowed list and come straight through. For new numbers from genuine callers they figure it out and the phone rings and states the name the caller gave when prompted.
As it does this silently we don’t get the annoying ring like the online call blockers.

That is what I was going to post. Here is a two handset version of the one we have. You can choose how many handsets you want.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086Q … =UTF8&th=1

One nice thing is these handsets have a button on the side to boost the volume for people who are hard of hearing. My wife wears hearing aids and she likes this feature.

You can set it up several different ways. Ours is set up so that it says something like “The number you have reached does not accept unsolicited calls. If this call is expected press the “#” button to be connected.” Since we got it almost two years ago I think there have be three sales people who pressed the # button to be connected.

Calls from numbers who have been entered on your approved list do not get that message.

There have only been a few legitimate calls for places like doctors offices which had a robocall to remind us an appointment which have been blocked but we were able to add those to the approved list when we saw them.

As I recall setting it up was a bit of effort since I had to figure it out then manually enter a couple of dozen approved numbers.

After having this almost two years we have been dropped from most spam call lists and we only get a few calls a week which this still blocks.

It has been at least six months since we had a sales call.

TimeRunner wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 5:18 pm
Assuming it’s a traditional landline, you might look at a service like https://nomorobo.com (free for landlines). Won’t solve the problem, but it will catch some of those calls.

Just a comment. We have Nomorobo. But a) The phone still rings once. If Nomorobo catches it, it only rings once, but it rings. It is still distracting and it does take discipline to steel yourself never to answer any call until the second ring.

b) It isn’t very effective. My guess is that it catches about half of our junk calls.

I went through this with my mother just after my father died (she was in her early 80s). I had to close her checking account and open new ones twice, changing all of the autopays and direct deposits each time.

I told her not to answer the phone to anybody not in her on-phone caller ID list, but she couldn’t bring herself not to answer. I printed out a sign to put next to each phone for her to read to them that said, “I don’t give out any information over the phone. Please mail me your request. (HANG UP!)” But they were so persuasive that she gave in. She said, “I knew I shouldn’t tell them but I couldn’t help it.” I told her, yes-these are professionals and very persuasive.

I opened a new checking account for her to write small checks for magazines and things and another that I kept the checkbook for to accept direct deposits and bill pays. I left her with a few hundred dollars in hers. Of course, it never happened again after that.

I could not keep her from answering the phone or giving in to the scams, but I could limit the damage.