Chapter 9 — Spotting the scams
Four minutes at Sunday dinner
This week — not "sometime," this week — install the family password. At dinner or by group call, agree on one unguessable word or phrase: not on the Christmas card, not on the internet, not written down. The rule that goes with it: any distress call, any voice, gets the callback rule regardless — "I love you, I'm hanging up, I'm calling you right back" — at the number already in your phone.
Four minutes, and the single most sophisticated weapon in the modern con arsenal — a cloned voice with your grandchild's catch in it — bounces off your kitchen phone. The grandchildren, Pearl reports, will treat it like a heist movie. Let them. Recruitment is easiest when it's fun.
The counterintelligence four
1. The audition
I received this message [paste text only — click nothing]. Assume guilty until proven innocent. Name the manipulation techniques in play, what you'd verify and how, and the safest next move. Don't tell me to click anything in it.
2. The pre-flight check
I'm about to [spend / donate / sign / share]. Here's the full pitch as I understand it: [everything]. Interrogate it like a skeptical friend: what gets verified before a dime moves, and through what official front doors?
3. The taxonomist
Explain how the [grandparent call / fake invoice / tech support / romance / AI-investment] scam actually works, step by step, from the con's side of the table — what they say, what they're pressing, and where the script breaks if I use the callback rule. I want to recognize the machinery, not memorize the paint job.
4. The morning after
[What happened] happened — [money/information] went out [when, how]. Give me the exact sequence for the next two hours: who I call first and at what kind of number, what I say, what records I create, where I report it. Numbered steps. No lecture — I know.
That "no lecture — I know" is load-bearing, and the machine honors it, which is more than can be said for everyone at the table. Speaking of the table: the grandchildren keep coming up in this chapter — the passwords, the voices, the heist-movie glee. Time they got a chapter of their own.
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or any of their cousins.