Ep. 43: Protecting Vulnerable Populations from Scams | Teaching Boundaries and Internet Safety

In this episode, we discuss the challenges of protecting vulnerable populations, including aging parents and individuals with autism, from scams. We dive into practical strategies for teaching boundaries, internet safety, and identifying red flags, with examples tailored for different developmental levels.

🎯 Key Takeaways
💡 Scammers thrive on urgency: Their goal is to create fight-or-flight reactions, pushing victims to act quickly and irrationally.
🔑 Examples and non-examples matter: Teaching specific situations helps learners better understand boundaries and safety.
🛑 Teach "Pause and Verify": Whether it’s an unfamiliar phone call, email, or social media link, teach learners to stop, check the source, and verify authenticity.
👥 Trusted adults are key: Reinforce the importance of having someone to consult before making decisions about sensitive information or transactions.
🌐 Privacy settings are crucial: Teach learners and aging parents how to adjust social media and online account settings to limit exposure of personal details.

Resources Mentioned
🌍 Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Learn about current scams and tips for prevention. Visit FTC.gov
📘 Practical Teaching Tips: Use real-life examples and scenarios to teach boundaries and internet safety effectively.

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Transcript

Sami: [00:00:00] They're going to create some scenario or situation that's going to have them act quickly and irrationally, because they're creating a sense of urgency, and once a sense of urgency gets created, someone's fight or flight kicks in 

Intro: Welcome to the Misfit Behaviorist podcast part two. Join your hosts, Audra Jensen and Sami Brown here to bring you fun and functional advice for behavior support professionals and special education teachers. Let's get started. 

Audra: Welcome back to the Misfit Behaviorist. Sami, what are we talking about today?

Sami: So today we were talking about managing, I was going to say dealing with, but I think managing is a bit more appropriate, aging parents. It's something that I don't feel like is discussed enough amongst our group of friends. And I, to be fair, I'm in a smaller pocket, a micro group that's actually already facing that. Many of my friends are not quite there. So I'm paving the way. But dealing with aging parents, and there's a whole plethora of [00:01:00] challenges that come with that. But there's one really specific thing I think that is important for us to be sharing, and that's we've talked about them being a vulnerable population themselves and how easily they can be taken advantage of.

Audra: Well, and also, and this is why we want to discuss it because we work with vulnerable populations. So what we're talking about today is specific to our situations with aging parents, but we have so many of our, especially our autistic community, young adults who are easily susceptible to some of these situations. And I think it's important that we're aware of that, and we teach them from early on how to set those boundaries, how to have trusted adults that they run things through because they are really susceptible to the crappy people in the world. 

Sami: I think that one thing that's really important, regardless of whether we're talking about our parents, or we're talking about the population of individuals that we serve, is when we're providing access to whatever it is that we're giving them or teaching them, that we [00:02:00] provide them with the examples and non examples of that as well. And that's something that's really important for BCBAs that we talk about is providing that information. So, if you've got a young adult learner, that's coming into gaining access to their own Internet or emails or phones or technology; technology specific, I think that there are some very severe pre training that needs to occur to prevent that very severe situations from happening. 

Audra: And giving them, I think you touched on it, giving them examples. I think what you would what you would teach a typically developing kid growing up is going to be different. I was able to give very general information to a typically developing daughter and she understood what those meant; when it comes to my son, it had to be very clear. Like this is the big rule or whatever, but these are specific examples of how this plays out. Because some of our learners are not going to be able to understand the nuance that we just get naturally from our environment. They need [00:03:00] those specific examples and non examples of what the expected behaviors are in the community. 

Sami: I've talked to both of my children who have cell phones how easy it is for someone to reach them. I mean, I dare someone in the nineties to try to connect with me via my pager, right? Like, what were they gonna do? I had a pager, like nothing is gonna happen. But here we have different ages that have their own cell phones. And so we've had those very clear discussions of, If someone is calling you from a number that you do not recognize at all, do not answer, period. Because if it's important, and it's somebody you know, they're going to call again, they're going to text message, they're going to leave a voicemail. And if they don't, can't be that important. 

Audra: That's a perfect lead into some situations that my own mother has gone into, you know, my dad passed away just six months ago, and he dealt with Alzheimer's for the 5 years previous to that. So she's been kind of alone for a period of time . And he, [00:04:00] because she comes from a different generation, my dad was the one who was in charge of the computers and the phones and managing everything. All of a sudden, she has all of this information, she doesn't know how to navigate it. And she has fallen for a number of scams. A number of times people sending her an email or it's, you know what, it's usually Facebook. Somebody posts something a scam thing and she clicks on the link thinking it's something and then she gets some virus in there and you're supposed to call Microsoft with the number that's on there and so she gets pulled into these things. I mean, she got she went so far as they got her before she knew to hang up and call me. They got her in the Walmart parking lot about to pick up the all the gift cards that they're supposed to get. They're supposed to fix the thing, whatever it was. And it's just she's innocent. It comes from this innate desire of her to believe that everybody is doing good around her and that there are only good people and she's the sweetest person. So she could never think that somebody's out to get her for whatever reason. And so she's a prime target, which is the same [00:05:00] situation we have with a lot of our learners on the spectrum or otherwise. You know, I, I live with a police officer. So I assume everybody's out to get me all the time because that's just kind of what it is. But you know, my son is not like that. My mom is not like that. They assume everybody's out to do good. 

Sami: I think that what is so challenging, at least speaking about the aging population or our parents generation is they're not getting the feedback and the warnings from TikTok, from Instagram, from maybe from Facebook. That seems to be the platform that is most chosen, but they need to hear more from the direct news and what are all the different types of scams. And I feel like sometimes what I see or hear is you'll hear it on the news. Oh, here's the newest scam. I feel like that's something that we need to be talking about all the time. That should have its own segment because there are so many different types. So we talked a lot about don't answer a phone call from a number that you don't recognize. And the importance that if it is somebody that you know, and is trying to reach you, [00:06:00] they're going to leave a follow up message in whether text form voicemail or whatnot. But it's also with email, checking the email address of who is sending it to you. If it's coming from a PayPal, if it's coming from Chase Bank, It should come from the dot com of chasebank. com. It shouldn't come from a Gmail. And so that's the first thing is just looking into who it's actually, it's coming from, but don't click any link at all.

Audra: That and the newest thing is they can pirate the name. So it can look like it's coming from chase. com. And so what, it took a long time for me to get my mom to be able to do that. Like don't answer those phone calls. I finally got her doing that, but now she may see chase. com and think it's actually from chase. I'm like, don't answer anything directly. If there's something that looks like it might be true, go directly into your Chase bank or you contact Amazon or whoever directly, don't use anything that they put into the email or on the Facebook post or whatever it is, go directly to the source and find [00:07:00] out and verify from there. 

Sami: Yes, and it's interesting because I've had these conversations just in general in our family preparing and hopefully preventing situations from occurring, but this is a scammers full time job, they're good at it. I mean, because it's all they're focusing on. And so even attachments and PDFs and documents and things that they're going to provide to you. They're going to look like they've been authenticated because that's what they are intending to do. And with AI and the things that we have available on the internet to us now, it's a scary place. And so one click on anything can give remote access to your computer and a lot can happen. And it happens very quickly. We talk a lot about behavior, obviously as BCBAs, but just looking on the nuances of just human behavior, we all have kind of our own set routines, even for me, if I'm getting up in the morning and I'm getting my cup of coffee first, and then I'm feeding the dogs or taking the dogs out. There are certain things that we do just day to day. And I think that looking at our [00:08:00] vulnerable population of people, if their routine looks like it's been disrupted or they're doing something that looks like it's out of line for what's normal, that is enough to be able to make us go, huh, let's just take a pause. We naturally and inherently are going to try to explain it away. Oh, they didn't sleep well, we're going to try to find that reason. But I think that For those that are around people that are aging parents or have, you know, vulnerable people that we're close to or that we work with, it's really important for us to go, but do I need to explain this away? And is there something? Because the whole part of the scamming, whatever scam it is, is to get someone to almost be off of balance. They're going to create some scenario or situation that's going to have them act quickly and irrationally, because they're creating a sense of urgency, and once a sense of urgency gets created, someone's fight or flight kicks in, and they're not acting slow, they're not acting methodical, they're going to make errors [00:09:00] and mistakes and that is the scammer's hope, is that they can catch them off of balance to get them to act and react in a manner that they want them to. 

Audra: It sounds like you've been through Scammer's University. 

Sami: You know, I'm actually thinking about starting a course. 

Audra: So my mom, we've trained her and she now knows to check her banking account regularly. And she saw a charge on there that was not hers. It was a small charge. Which maybe, you know, five years ago, she wouldn't have thought about it. But because we've trained her enough and enough stuff has happened, she immediately went into the bank itself. And she said, this isn't my charge. They were able to say, well, we can't do anything because it was pending still, you know. So then she called me and I said, okay, you need to cancel your card number. She did that. She changed the card and obviously nothing else is going to happen, at least with this situation. Whereas, a year ago, maybe she would have fallen for the thing and the big charge and stuff. It's all about those examples and non examples and practicing and then getting reinforced because now she's avoided this situation from happening [00:10:00] again. 

Sami: And it's interesting because I've even with my own card had a charge go through that was a very small you could almost have overlooked to the charge and I'm trying to figure out where the charge was and it came from originated in California and the place was actually closed and it didn't take much for me to reach out to my credit card company and dispute the charge, but really what they even educated me is that sometimes if we're not even reporting the small ones, the small one is just an initial test the water. Can I get away with making a purchase on this card? How aware is this individual? Because if they didn't stop it or change the card number, dispute it, then they're going to try the card again. And they might try it again for another nondescript amount, or they might go in and buy themselves a whole pile of puppies. So it's a scary place. To keep up with the amount of different type of scams, it's really challenging. I know that the federal trade commission has something on their website. You can go through, it'll say a lot of what the active scams are. 

Audra: I think it's really important [00:11:00] as we bring it back to our populations that we work with, that we start from them as young as possible talking about guarding themselves physically, emotionally, socially, financially. Being on the guard and always going to those direct sources for information and again, like I said, talking about always having a trusted adult in their community, in their life, that they know that they can go talk to, regardless of what the situation is. if they feel like they've fallen in love with somebody, a trusted adult that will not pass judgment on them, but that will help them figure out if something's true or not true and what to do about it.

Sami: And because the Internet allows any individual to have their own secret identity, so to speak, you never know who is behind the screen. A really important part is not oversharing private information of where you live, the city that you live in, and even Facebook alone, even at the top. Anyone who's on your page, they know it's asked, what's your city that [00:12:00] you're living, what's your date of birth, and so some of those things you actually need to go in and set to the privacy setting to secret or to yourself only, or to your friends only. So there's all these checks and balances that we really need to kind of slow down, but make sure that we're teaching those examples. 

Audra: Just to remember again, just teaching your littles as young as you can boundaries. Thanks for joining us and we will see you again next week. 

Intro: Thanks for listening to the Misfit Behaviorists and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and tricks. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.