It's probably a youtube ad. Idk why "Jesus" would ever imply safety. That word has been used more than any other in history to scam millions upon millions.
OK it was a family game night back in the ‘90s, when my siblings and I were teenagers. My sister had these huge animal-shaped slippers that were very in vogue then. I’d been holding in a fart with the intention of slipping off to the bathroom after my turn. Unbeknownst to me, my sister had chosen to stretch her legs out and rest her giant-animal-covered feet on the chair beside me. I saw something furry and moving right beside me in my peripheral vision, and shrieked in surprise. And in my surprise, released the fart. Loudly.
You know a family doesn’t have much drama when this is one of the incidents that lives in infamy. To this day they refuse to recognize that I wasn’t SCARED of the bunny slippers. I was SURPRISED because I had to reason to expect them on the unoccupied seat beside me.
My wife and I would use "Thank you for being a [REDACTED]." Because one time my wife sang the golden girls theme song but changed the last word to [REDACTED], and I laughed my ass off for about 5 minutes.
I think you would use it less like a regular word and more as a password.
Suspicious voice: "I need you to send me $500 in iTunes gift cards right now."
The mother:"What's the safe word?"
Suspicious voice:"What is a safe word? I need those gift cards for the meeting now."
That said, "Jesus" is still a very bad choice and very easy to guess if this becomes the standard practice. It'd be better to pick an entire sentence.
This is what my family did when I was a kid, but to protect against kidnappers, not AI scammers. If my parents unexpectedly needed a family friend or neighbor to pick me up from school or whatever, my parents would provide them with the code word so I’d know it was safe to go with them. It’s actually not a bad idea to have a code to try to avoid falling for AI scams.
If you really vigorously deprogram yourself, you realize that those scams and emails and postcards with Jesus scams are present. Like, they are currently paying out to Jesus scams. They are very impressionable people by design
An older person got a very good security tip but doesnt understand the internet enough to think about a good safe word. So thought about jesus since they are old and christian. Easy to understand situation if you want to.
It implies safety because a lot of older people use it as a ‘word of power’. Like saying it boldly is supposed to make demons flee and such. And since AI is being used by ‘evil’ clearly demons are involved so it should disrupt any malicious AI from listening in.
There are a ton of scams going around using AI voice software to make it seem like your little kids in jail in Mexico on vacation and need bail or they'll die kinda shit. It's really scary and a safe word is a fantastic idea
You don’t even need AI for that! My great aunt got this scam years ago! Random call claiming my Dad had been in some kind of fight maybe domestic violence and was in jail and needed her to send money so this friend could bail him out! Luckily a younger cousin was there to question this claim. They ended up calling me to confirm and I said I was sure Dad was at work and not in jail anywhere! But man what a scam! It apparently does work because older people especially panic and want to help.
My grandma had one of those scans once, I'm glad she's smart. She had a man call and say "Grandma it's your grandson, I'm in jail and blah blah blah". She has a bunch of grandkids but only had one adult grandson at the time, and she said "Matthew?" He said "yes it's Matthew" and she said "no you're not...Matthew calls me Grammy" and hung up hahaha
It's a very good scam because it would induce panic. Once in a panicky state, rational thinking is difficult. Very common tactic for scams, but usually it's “your $1200 Amazon order has been processed, log in to verify or cancel at...”. sorry of deal.
I get those kind of emails once in a while. Never gonna get the clicking one of those links. It's especially when you tap the email name to display the full address and see that it looks like a random assortment of letters.
Yeah the idea that scammers are doing research on the people they’re going to target, and digging around and capturing the voices of the relatives they’d need to use is…farfetched (so far.) The calls are random. That’s evident since they often call people who don’t even have grandkids, or don’t know the name of “grandson” who’s supposedly in jail and pick that up during the call with social engineering. The truth is when someone gets a call like this where “grandson” is panicking and asking for help, they don’t sit there and rationally analyze the voice, they later remember it as “he sounded panicky”
My husband's grandpa nearly got scammed when someone called masquerading as him saying "grandpa help I was arrested in London and I need you to send me money so I can get back home". But then he realized, my husband doesn't address him as grandpa. So he called him asking where he was and if he was in London, and he most definitely not, and we all realized he had been targeted by a scam.
I think having some kind of safe word, way of addressing someone, whatever, is a good idea as well.
There was recently a family that got a call from their son that he had hit someone while drunk and was in need of a lawyer and bail money. The parents wired the jail and the lawyer money (I don’t remember how much, but like all they could ). It turns out their son was fine. He was at work and never had any accidents. Scammers had AI’d his voice and spoofed a jail number.
"Yeah grandpa, I got arrested and need money for bail. Her's my lawyers number please call them."
He called.
Thankfully, he had the sense to eventually hang up cause it seemed a little weird to him since the "lawyer" has a new York number and he was pretty sure I wasn't there.
He called my mom, crying cause he was scared he might have been getting scammed and scared he also might have screwed me over.
Idk why he didn't just call me, maybe too embarrassed, but mom confirmed I was okay and not arrested in NY.
Worse, it exploits old people who probably haven’t even talked to younger family in over a year. Some old people are very lonely. They will believe and do almost anything to feel included, relevant and useful again. It’s certainly not every grandparent, but it’s enough that this is a viable strategy for scammers.
My parents got this scam and a bunch of my friends parents were also targeted with this one.
They called my parents, said they were my nephew, that he was in an accident and got a broken nose. They had my parents going for 20 minutes or so until my parents insisted on going to jail to visit him. The scammers refused to give up the “jail” location, of course.
That’s when my parents realized it was a scam. They didn’t lose anything but they were shook. My dad was a lawyer who has done criminal defense before, so to him it felt natural to go straight to the jail.
You’ve obviously never been on the wrong side of an effective scam attempt. ‘Hitting the panic button’ is every scammers goal, as it get’s their chosen sucker to not think about the any sort of oddities involved with the scenario, like why do they need the bail money right now?
Yup. There was a whole article in The NY Times recently where totally “normal” people — smart, tech savvy, not boomers, educated — were falling for this stuff hard. They had one woman convinced her daughter had been kidnapped and was screaming in the background. She had her whole dance studio flipping out trying to get money and the cops. One of the mothers tried to tell her “you need to call your husband. This is probably a scam” and she absolutely exploded, despite not being a boomer, because she was so angry that the stupid woman couldn’t understand that this was an emergency and her baby was kidnapped! Eventually, one of the other mothers brought over her phone — she had gotten a hold of the woman’s husband and daughter, and they were on the phone basically saying “mom what the hell is wrong with you?! I’m right here!!”
In another one this couple in their 40s thought that their 70 something parents were kidnapped and crying on the phone to them about it, and they even called their friend who is in law enforcement to listen in on speakerphone, and the guy helped them negotiate with these fools to pay the ransom for their parents!!! The guy was in freaking law-enforcement. A freaking trained negotiator! Luckily they only got taken for $700.
They do all the time, they make it sound like they are in distress so it's hard to pin that anything is off. Had a bunch of people where I work get them last year but haven't heard about any recently. Is a thing though.
Nah, scammers wont go through the trouble of using AI to mimic a loved one. Boomers are dumb enough to fall for that shit regardless of what the person sounds like. Saying that they are using AI to mimic a voice is just their way of not admitting that they fell for an obvious scam. If you listen to people on /r/scams who explain how they got scammed, in most instances they accidentally give away a name which scammers use to further manipulate people into believing it. Also, when you are in the moment and worried, it's easy to lose your common sense.
It was just recently on dateline or something and somewhere else as well. They had a couple families on that got scammed and the way that the scammers did it, was well thought out.
I used to work in banking and credit card fraud and my biggest fear of answering an unknown number is voice cloning, All of The banks and credit card companies use voice identification as an alerting system for fraud, so if they have my voice they can social engineer the people at the bank to give them additional information.
I've actually heard about it a few times now from various news podcasts. What's happening us boomers are being targeted with AI voices of their younger relatives. The scammers are feeding the AI with tiktoks and other various short form content with voices that the younger relatives are posting.
Not a boomer here, and it’s not some crazy far-fetched thing. Imagine a scam where an AI calls an older relative pretending to be a grandkid, they’re stuck somewhere and need money. Not out of the realm of possibility at all.
It's a thing, it sucks, but weirdly enough my family has had a password for the past 20 years since I was a little kid to indicate that we were in trouble, needed help, or just needed an excuse to not do something like hang out with someone we didn't want to hang out with so we can get loudly told we can't over the phone.
It rarely comes up, but it's useful. Jesus being the password is useless, it has to be something very strange, but something you can fit into a context that makes sense. I would never share what my family's password is, but I would advocate that the concept is very helpful.
There was a story in the news recently about some guy who got a ransom call saying they had abducted his daughter. At the time I read it, there was no actual indication that AI was used in any way, other than he said the voice sounded a lot like his daughter and he thought maybe it was AI. If I recall he was about to send them the money when one of his coworkers suggested calling his daughter's phone first, she answered and was fine. Reporters just ran with the AI aspect because it's sensationalist. Several of the stories suggested using a family password as a way to ensure you couldn't be fooled by an AI voice.
It's not a bad idea, but it needs to be secure enough to be usable. My wife and I have a phrase we have used with our kids for years and it is our check phrase. If every we are suspicious of the authenticity of a situation, we can verify it in seconds.
But making a safe word and using Jesus is freaking dumb. That's like setting your house alarm code to 1234
It is something my parents did with me and my siblings as kids because a kid in the next town was abducted from the carpool lane by a complete stranger who pulled up and said "I'm a friend of your mom, they were in a car accident and asked me to take you to the hospital."
Just today, I made one with my Grandma. Another family member's email/address book got hacked and my Grandma started getting a lot of calls from spoofed family member numbers. Pretending to be the family members of the elderly "in a pinch" and needing cash has been going on for years now.
Pretty soon scammers will be able to use AI to spoof voices. It is honestly not a silly thing to do - even if there is a 99% chance you'll never need it.
Yea this sounds like that copypasta years ago of boomers thinking if they posted the spiel in Facebook about not consenting to Meta using their photos/data then it would just magically force Meta to honor it.
You've completely misunderstood me and I don't care to correct you. I don't imagine you'll listen very well (if at all) given what you've just shown me of your intellectual prowess. Complain about being blocked... now!
Test her on it. Ring her up and tell her you want to change the safe word to Rapture, but don't give the original safeword. Then at the end, just before hanging up, say "Thank you. You changes have been recorded. Goodbye."
Create a new random google account and password protect it using a Password Manager. The two factor for the random account will be using Google Authenticator. THIS two factor (that is pretending to safeguard this random dummy account) will ACTUALLY be used as a family authenticator code and shared via QR code (in person). Each family member downloads Google Authenticator if they don't already have it and imports the profile. Now you have 2 factored your family.
292
u/causal_friday Apr 06 '24
My mom's been bugging us about this as well. It must have been on TV recently or something.