Summary

There are a large amount of scams perpetrated over phone or email aimed at the elderly. These usually involve impersonating a legitimate entity (tax authorities are popular part of the year, but also utilities and other services), and using fear or trust to convince the target to send money to the scammers. Other scams involve impersonating a relative.

Any old person with a phone line or email account is potentially vulnerable and the absolute number of such people is increasing as the population ages.

While some technological improvements are on the way they’re not able to stop the core problem.

The idea is to build a service that pre-screens all incoming calls and emails to fend off scammers, sold as a monthly subscription. It’d be marketed to adults whose elderly parents are still nominally independent but at increased risk of getting scammed.

Why do this in Próspera?

While technology can do some of the screening (such as whitelisting known-good phone numbers), the early days will depend on what is essentially a call center. This can only be done in a country where we can have reasonably cheap employees to man the lines working alongside programmers seeking to automate at least some of the work. And it has to be in a timezone compatible with the country where the customers being protected live.

Downsides

Setting up a call-center’s worth of data traffic may be more expensive on Roatán than on the mainland.

Open questions

Does the service provide sufficient value?

There was $148M of gift card scams in the first 9 months of 2021. The fraction that happens to the elderly or otherwise dependent is unclear, and so is the fraction a reasonable person would be willing to pay to prevent it.

How do people become aware of this issue, and how do they deal with it?

If the issue is limited to people who haven’t learned about this problem yet, and there are good solutions for those who have, there’s little business opportunity.