I don’t trust anyone calling me who isn’t already in my contacts.

Callers from legitimate businesses treat me like i’m questioning the moon landing when I tell them I’ll need to call them at an official number.

Now try and convince your family to do the same (especially parents who are prime targets).

▲

II2II 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Callers from legitimate businesses treat me like i’m questioning the moon landing when I tell them I’ll need to call them at an official number.

Not to justify their behaviour, but: most businesses are not set up to allow for callbacks or they're set up to actively discourage them. For example: they may be contracting out to call centers or employee performance may depend upon making a sale. My situation is unique since all calls our handled internally and my performance is not based upon making a sale.

That's said, the current situation pretty much dictates that a secure option should be offered to clients.

▲

benmanns 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The trouble is, you have to place the outbound call to those contacts to trust them. People could spoof an incoming call from numbers in your contacts and it will look as legitimate to you as a receiver as if the real number was calling you. With voice spoofing, it's now possible to call someone as [grandchild] with [grandchild]'s voice with a pretty horrible story about what's going to happen if some Bitcoin or Google Play gift cards are not purchased and handed over immediately.

▲

rapind 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'll give you an example. When the Bank calls me about something important, I tell them to give me their department / extension and I'll call them back. I then look up the bank's phone number on their website (it's actually in my phone already, and on my bank cards) and call them back.

This process doesn't care about them calling from a spoofed number. We've had big problems with spoofed number scams and the CRA (Canadian version of the IRS) recently.

▲

0xffff2 4 days ago | parent [-]

So in other words, you don't trust any incoming calls, even if they appear to be from a number saved in your contacts?

	▲	rapind 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		No. If it's someone I know, and I can tell that's who they are from their voice, and they aren't suddenly trying to pry a bunch of financial information from me, then I trust them. I also don't even accept calls from unknown numbers by default, unless I explicitly turn that off temporarily because I'm expecting a call from someone not in my contacts. There are plenty of other ways to get ahold of me. AI speech still has some noticeable quirks (I cloned my voice earlier this year to produce some tutorials). Once those are ironed out, I may increase my paranoia a bit. It's going to be hard for an AI faking a relative to get my bank password, if that even happens. There are far more lucrative targets with that level of investment. I think just being on guard and not trusting potential anonymous sources is "good enough" for now.

▲

intrasight 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've not once had a legitimate company not say "good for you in taking the extra security precaution of calling us back".

▲

nothrabannosir 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

No kidding!? I have never had someone take this in stride. Responses have ranged from surprise to defensive condescension. It rarely even works at all, and the two worst offenders were both banks. One UK, one USA. I almost had the check for my rent bounce after three days of this rigmarole and ended up having to just go with it.

Where do you bank? I'm looking for recommendations.

▲

plasticchris 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Even better, once I had a financial institution tell me I needed to read them a one time code someone would text me. They were actually surprised I had a problem with it when it’s the scam playbook.

	▲	GoblinSlayer 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Isn't that just 2fa? It's not limited to web.

▲

BobbyTables2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I suspect far more people question the moon landing than the authenticity of caller!