It’s OK to hang up on scammers

I like to show a photo of a yellow rotary dial phone circa 1980. I ask my audience to raise their hand if they ever had a similar phone. After I show the photo of the phone, I always ask “what did we do when that phone rang?” The standard response is always “we answered it.” People my age and older were not only conditioned to answer the phone, we were expected to be polite. Hanging up on someone was unheard of.

Let’s Talk About Scams is broadcast live Tuesdays at 8AM PT on K4HD Radio - Hollywood Talk Radio (www.k4hd.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Let’s Talk About Scams TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).

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Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional / legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from vetted sources and references; however, R.O.S.E. Resources / Outreach to Safeguard the Elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to a scam.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
This program is designed to provide general information with regards
to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial,
legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek

(00:22):
the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any
suggested ideas. The information contained in this podcast is intended
for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for
individual professional legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled
from debted sources and references. However, Rose Resources outreach to

(00:44):
safeguard the elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall
victim to a scam. Let's talk about scams. It's the
must listen show for anyone who wants to protect themselves
and their loved ones from scams. Every Tuesday at am
Pacific time on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder

(01:05):
of Rose, and her guests will provide valuable insights and
practical tips on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams.
And now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Good Morning, everybody, welcome to Let's talk about Scams. My
name is Brian Watson. I am a community outreach specialist
for Rose Resources Outreach to safeguard the elderly. Obviously, I'm
not Joyce Petrowski. Joyce is our founder. She is taking
a much needed break and I'm very flattered that she
lets me fill in and take the reins to this show.

(01:44):
Today we are going to talk about phone scams and
the title of this week's show is It's Okay to
Hang up on Scammers. I am giving you permission. So
I do a lot of presentations. I've done at least
seven five presentations over the last two years to a
variety of audiences. And scams are a very very heavy topic.

(02:09):
I mean, we tell stories of people who've lost their
life savings. There's stories of people who've committed suicide because
they've lost everything. It's a tough topic to talk about.
So I like to inject a little bit of humor.
It's okay to laugh. It's just necessary to lighten the
mood a little bit. And so I tell some funny

(02:33):
stories and I tell people it's okay to laugh. And
one of the things I like to do I want
to show my first slide today, my only slide today.
It is a picture of a yellow rotary foam and
this one's actually generated by artificial intelligence AI is very
useful in my mind. But I show this picture to

(02:57):
my audience and I ask them, raise your hand if
you ever had this phone at your house. And the
funny thing that happens is I get a bunch of
hands that raise up and everyone laughs because we all
had this phone around nineteen eighty. I grew up with
a phone just like this in my house and it

(03:17):
was yellow. And what I've come to find out doing
all these presentations is there was like one model of phones,
and I think there were only three colors, and here
here's the yellow one. The other ones were like light
blue and maybe some other shade. But it always gets
a laugh because you know, people can relate to this

(03:39):
because we all had this phone. And after I show
the photo of this phone, I always ask what did
we do when that phone rang? And the standard response
that everybody's always provided is we answered it. Well, why
because four years ago we didn't most of us didn't

(03:59):
have call waiting caller ID, we didn't have answering machines.
The telephone was the way that we communicated with our friends,
our families, and our neighbors. It was like the lifeline
to our social life. It's the way Grandma and Grandpa
got ahold of us. It's how we figured out what

(04:19):
we were doing on a Friday night with our friends.
So most people who are my age or older, we
are conditioned to answer the phone because we didn't have
email and text messaging, and we were also expected to
be very polite. You answered the phone, and you're very
respectful to whoever was there. Hanging up on the phone

(04:42):
on someone was unheard of. And also back in the
nineteen eighties, phone scams weren't very prevalent. In fact, there
really were no phone scams. You might get some crank
calls here or there, but it's nothing like we're dealing
with right now. So today, like I said, we're going
to to talk about phone scams. And this phone, this

(05:05):
rotary phone from nineteen eighty ish, is why many of
us get in trouble when it comes to phone scams. Today,
my generation and the generation that's older than me, we
are hardwired to answer the phone, to pick up the
phone and be nice. So all right, we can put

(05:25):
the slide down. We don't need that anymore. Thank you
for watching it, everybody. Next time, I'll have more slides
when I present, I like to have visuals. So what
are some examples of phone scams that we're seeing today. Well,
one very common one is one people scammers pretending to
be the government. This is Social Security Administration. There's something

(05:47):
wrong with your account. This is the IRS. You owe money.
This is Medicare. You need to renew your card or
else you're gonna have no benefits. Stuff right. Or someone
calls up and it's very chaotic in the background and
someone says a young voice grandma grandma or grandpa grandpa.

(06:11):
I'm in jail, help me, help me. That's the grandparent scam.
That one's very common as well. Or the ones we're
seeing more lately is this is so and so from
the security department at your bank. Someone is trying to
steal your money. We need to move it somewhere safe,
and you instantly panic and believe them. Or this is

(06:34):
a computer company and there is a virus on your computer.
We need to act quickly or you're going to lose
all your files. And the last one I want to
mention today is the one you won a prize call?
This is Publishers Clearing, how sweepstakes? You've just won our
grand prize. How would you like your money? So these
are types of phone scams we're talking about. And the

(06:56):
people that call, the scammers that call are very good.
They are not first time callers. They are sitting in
an office somewhere, probably with a lot of other people,
using computers and reading scripts off that computer. They're literally
just reading and if the caller says a certain thing,

(07:17):
they have a response for it. They have an answer
for everything. So here's some advice that we like to
give it Rose. In order to not be scammed, we
recommend that you screen your phone calls. So what does
that mean? That means when the phone rings, I have
my cell phone in front of me. Here, I look
at the caller ID. I pretty much only answer calls

(07:41):
if the person is already in my address book on
my phone, my contact list, and you know, and if
they're not, all my alarms go off and I'm very
very cautious and I'm prepared to hang up. But look
at the caller ID. Make sure it's someone you know.
You can screen the call. That means let it go

(08:04):
to voicemail, okay. If it's legitimate, someone will leave a message.
For instance, a new doctor you're going to, they'll leave
a message, this is doctor Smith's office. We're trying to
reach you, Centurion. We want to schedule an appointment. Please
call us back at this number. Then you can call
them back. That's just the way you do it. Now,

(08:26):
if you do answer the phone and you don't like
the way it's going, you have a duty to yourself
to your family to end the call. Scammers are going
to lie to you and try to take your money.
All you have to do is hit that button that
says end call. You don't have to apologize, you just

(08:49):
hit that button. And if you can't do that, I'm
giving you permission to lie to scammers. Okay. And another
funny story is last year where I was at a
church in Tucson, Arizona, and I start talking about phone scams,
and I told everybody, you are allowed to lie. And

(09:11):
then it caught my attention real quick that I was
in a house of worship, and of course that got
a chuckle. Like I said at the beginning of the show,
it's okay to have fun talking scam prevention it lightens
the mood, it relaxes us a little bit. We're still
very serious about what we do here and the advice
that we provide. But you can laugh. But yes, I'm

(09:34):
giving you permission to lie. You have no obligation to
be polite to scammers. They are calling you up and
trying to take your life savings. So when I say
you can lie to a scammer because you're just too
afraid to hang up. What are some examples of lies
that I tell people to use. Well, one you could

(09:55):
say I have friends at the house right now. My
friends are over right now, we're doing book club, we're
playing cards, we're having dinner, we're having happy hour. I'm
too busy right now. I'll call you back later or
leave a message text me. You can say someone's at
the door, you know my friend, we're bringing over some food,
or dropping off a shipment that was received, that the

(10:18):
mail they picked up, or something like that. How about
this one, I have food in the oven, I don't
have time to talk right now, I don't want to
burn dinner. Or you can even say I need to
use the restroom, like everyone understands that one. So those
are four lies that I just shared with you that
you can provide to scammers. You know, the best thing

(10:40):
is screen your call. The next thing is, if you
don't like the way the call's going, just hang up,
just say I'm sorry, hang up, bye, no, thank you.
And then the third option is if you got in
that far and you're afraid to hang up, and you're afraid,
just you can lie. Okay, scammers are going to lie
to you, you can lie to them. So what I've

(11:03):
learned to being in the scam prevention business in the
nonprofit world, working for Rose for almost two years, it
doesn't matter how smart you are, how educated you are,
where you live, how much money you have. Today's scammers
are professional criminals. They are way better at this than

(11:25):
you are. This is what they do full time. Okay,
it's just not a fair fight. And they're using these
scripts that are proven to work. And these scammers sound
very professional their voices. The background noise is the terminology
they use. They have an answer for everything, and every

(11:46):
victim that I've met is a very smart person who's
just been outwitted by a clever criminal. And that's been
one of the biggest surprises. When I started doing these
presentations for Rose. I expected to meet some victims, and
I really thought the victims were going to be would

(12:07):
have some sort of cognitive decline, you know, would not
be there. But that has not been the case. Everyone
that's been scammed that I know, they handle their finances,
they pay their own bills, they have a phone, they
have a computer. They might have, you know, an iPad
or a tablet or something like that. They're very active

(12:27):
on the internet. They're super smart. But they're just the
people to get scammed, just engaged with the criminals, and
you have to disengage. So I have this story I
want to share. I do a lot of presentations and
sometimes I do them with other people, and I've had
the opportunity to work with my new friend Laura. She's

(12:48):
a bank manager and she engages with a lot of people.
And Laura is awesome because she stopped a lot of scams.
She's at her branch, she's always looking out for her customers.
And Laura tells this story when we do these joint presentations.

(13:09):
She had a client who lost money through a phone
scam and the client, the customer had said, yeah, I
knew I was getting scammed. I knew but you know,
I just I didn't know what to do. And Laura said, well,
why didn't you just hang up on this scammer. You're

(13:29):
a smart woman, you knew you were getting scammed. You
didn't like the way the phone call was going. And
the customer said that she didn't want to be rude.
Now let's just take a step back there. This lady's
parents would be very proud that their daughter had good manners,

(13:50):
especially on the phone, was polite. But you know what,
we can't do this anymore. We do not have to
be nice anymore. We have to tough enough. We have
to get us fine, and you need to be a
little mean. Okay, I am giving you permission to be
mean to scammers, to lie to scammers, to just hang

(14:11):
up the phone not have to say anything. It's time
for all of us to put away the niceties and
refuse to be the victims of scams, especially these phone scams.
Every time I hear of someone else getting taken advantage of,
I get a little angry and I get frustrated. And

(14:31):
it's actually very motivating for me and my colleagues at
Rose to get out there and meet more people and
warn them, and so We also want you to go
to Rosadvocacy dot org. We have a great website for
more information. Please please please sign up for our monthly email.

(14:52):
When you sign up for that, you'll get an email
every single month with the latest scams and tips and
just good ideas to share. When you get that email,
share it with your friends and families and your neighbors.
Tell them, hey, you've got to be doing something about
scam prevention. And then also today's radio show, share this
podcast with someone you know. We're keeping it tight here.

(15:15):
This is like less than twenty minutes. It's an easy watch.
And this is some good advice. Not that I came
up with this advice. This is advice everyone shares in
the nonprofit world. That's just good common sense advice. Screen
your phone calls, be willing to hang up, be willing
to lie, refuse to be a victim. And that's how

(15:37):
we're going to stop these scammers. What I've learned twenty
eight years in law enforcement and two years in the
nonprofit world, both jobs I have been doing scam prevention.
What I've learned is these scammers aren't going away anytime soon,
but we want to frustrate them and dry up their
pool of potential victims. All right, everybody, I really appreciate

(16:01):
the time you took today to listen to this information.
Please please please share it with someone else and come
back next week. Joyce will be back next week and
you get to see her again. But thank you very much,
appreciate it, have a great day. Thank you for watching.
Let's talk about scams.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
Well that's all the knowledge for this episode. Tune in
every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio
at KFORAHD dot com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge.
So you have the power to make scam protection your
healthy habit. And until then, feel free to reach out
to Joyce and Let's talk about scams.