Who actually falls for this, and why it isn't foolishness
Let me address this one early, because it matters more than any settings screen we will touch in this course.
I hear a version of it every time I teach: "I just don't understand how anyone falls for it." Usually delivered with a trace of pride, as though the speaker possessed some form of immunity.
No one has immunity. That unsettled me the first time I sat with it, and it still does.
It's not a smarts problem
Scams are not designed to defeat unintelligent people. They are designed to defeat busy people, tired people, people having a bad day, people who love someone and want to help them. That is the actual target. Intelligence barely enters into it.
Consider the sharpest person you know. Now consider whether they have ever sent a text to the wrong recipient, or signed something without reading it in full, or agreed to a phone call because they were mid-way through making dinner and simply wanted it to end. That is the entry point. Scammers do not require you to be unintelligent. They require you to be distracted, or rushed, or emotionally engaged. Everyone qualifies for that, at some point, on some day.
I can tell you exactly who catches these things in my own household, and who does not. My wife, Tiffany, caught a fake ward donation email before I did. It was spoofed to appear to originate inside our own ward, requesting a transfer to assist a family in need. I read it and began checking the sender address, the standard technical review. She read it and said "this doesn't sound like how the bishop talks." She was correct before I was. She flagged the tone. I flagged the header information roughly ten seconds later, after she had already reached the conclusion.
I credit her fully in class every time. Fair is fair. The point is not that she is more careful than I am. It is that neither of us caught it by the same method, and neither of us caught it through brilliance. We caught it because we slowed down enough to actually read the message rather than merely process it.
Who gets targeted, specifically
A few patterns I have observed repeatedly, sorted the way I sort everything — by the mechanism that hooks you:
- People who are alone a great deal. Isolation causes a friendly voice on the phone, or a warm message from an online stranger, to land with more force than it would if six other things were competing for your attention. I watched this develop slowly in someone in our ward, over the course of a month, before family even noticed. I do not tell that story for laughs. It was not funny. It is the reason I do not teach only the technical side of this. The emotional angle is the real vulnerability, most of the time.
- People who are busy or distracted. Parents mid-errand, caregivers, anyone managing many competing demands. A scam text about a missed delivery lands perfectly on someone already tracking six real deliveries.
- People who were raised to be polite. When someone official-sounding asks a direct question, many of us are conditioned to answer it. Scammers rely on that conditioning.
- People who feel behind on technology. They are more likely to defer to whoever "sounds like they know computers," which is precisely the voice on the other end of a fake tech support call.
None of that is a character flaw. It is simply what being a person living an actual life looks like.
What to actually do about it, starting today
- Interrupt the self-blame narrative before it starts. If you are fooled, or nearly are, do not sit on it out of embarrassment. Tell someone. Shame is the mechanism that lets these things spread quietly through a family or a ward.
- Build in a pause, deliberately. Before responding to anything urgent-sounding, physically set the phone down for two minutes. Go get a glass of water. Nearly every scam loses its force once the urgency subsides, even slightly.
- Discuss it at the dinner table, not only after something has gone wrong. Ask your family "has anyone gotten a weird text this week?" as a routine question, not a crisis question. Normalizing it is half the defense.
- Watch for tone, not only facts. Tiffany's read was tonal, not technical, and it worked. If a message does not sound like the person or organization it claims to represent, trust that instinct before you have located the definitive evidence.
My position, held firmly: the people who fall for these are not foolish. They are human on a day when the scam happened to fit. Blaming people for being caught only teaches the whole room to conceal it next time, and concealment is exactly what allows the same scam to succeed on someone else down the street.
Before next time, ask one person in your life, aloud, whether they have received any strange calls or texts lately. Note what they say. You may be surprised who has been quietly sitting on one.
~kenneth