
Every month, this post is about cyber criminals, IT security gaps or new, interesting digital topics. Today, I'm explaining how you can protect your (grand)parents from fraudulent calls.
In the last post, I reported on how you can often find out who the unknown phone number that is calling you belongs to. It was about recognizing annoying telephone salespeople selling overpriced Parma ham or dubious investment experts selling “super-safe” investment strategies before they take your money.
Although unsolicited advertising calls are prohibited in Switzerland, and if you do receive one, you can complain to the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) . However, real fraudsters don't care about this. The biggest problem is often not the advertising calls. It's the calls that go to our parents and grandparents. People who, due to their (far) advanced age, are much more likely to fall for grandparent scams and investment fraud.
For all those who care for and look after senior citizens in their family or relatives, here is the ultimate tip on how to protect these people from fraudulent calls. This trick works with any reasonably up-to-date router (modem) for the landline or via cell phone settings from the mobile phone provider.
Since most older people have a solid circle of friends that tends to shrink rather than grow due to biological factors, it shouldn't be a problem to store the phone numbers of all friends and the family doctor in the router's phone book. All calls from numbers that are not stored there are then forwarded directly to the answering machine without the phone ringing. This way, family and friends can reach grandma and grandpa at any time.
Other callers who are not stored in the system do get through, but they end up on the answering machine. Rare contacts, for example from tradesmen or property managers, are therefore still possible without any problems - albeit via the small detour of the answering machine. However, fraudsters and telemarketers are left empty-handed. Experience shows that they rarely, if ever, leave a message or request to be called back.
And if you want to be on the safe side, you can forward unknown numbers to your cell phone rather than to your answering machine and then simply "check" the caller yourself. This way, grandparent scam artists are kept out. And Grandma Hildegard's new love interest can easily be added to the phone book so that the lovebirds can now contact each other day and night.
At BORTOLI, we advise companies and self-employed people on IT security. But since firewalls aren't the only thing that prevents hacker attacks, we explain technical tricks to increase security for your private life too. Because if you have attentive and smart employees, your company network is simply better protected.