Member-only story
Duped: Why We Fall for Increasingly Scary Phone Scams
Our brains are evolutionarily unprepared for clever scammers who trick us with personal information and even artificial intelligence to prey on our worst fears. Learn how to avoid being fooled.
When the sheriff’s department called my wife to say she’d missed jury duty, she was initially confused and highly suspicious. She’d been called for jury duty recently but was dismissed from appearing. Had she missed something?
The caller, Sgt. Russ Skinner, kept my wise, skeptical, college-educated wife on the line by sounding very informed and official, rattling off laws and legal consequences — a felony punishable by a fine and jail time that “made my hair stand on end,” as she explained it. Skinner had a badge number and other official-sounding information, including a Failure to Appear number she was asked to write down.
You know where this is going.
My wife suspected bullshit all along, yet Skinner — which turns out to be the name of a real deputy in our sheriff's department — had her nervous. When he said she needed to hang on and speak to a judge, and she couldn’t hang up because they were on a recorded line, she replied: “But I can.” And she hung up —…
