Protecting Your Parents from Scams with Our New Family Plans

As people get into their 70s, they stand to lose more to fraud than any other age group—which makes a strong case for protecting the older people in our lives. 

If you’re looking to protect them online, you have several ways to go about it. Our new McAfee+ Family plans are one way, where two adults and four children get personalized online protection that they can set up and manage on their own. With your McAfee+ Family plan  a simple invitation, you can rest easy that they’re protected against online scams and other threats. 

And threats certainly face us all, and hit older adults hardest. 

In the following table courtesy of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), you can see the risks that adults faced in 2022. While younger victims reported fraud loss at a higher rate, their median losses were typically smaller than the losses of older adults. By the time victims reach their 70s and 80s, the reporting rate dropped, yet the median losses made a significant leap. 

Note that these are reported cases of fraud, and those reported to the FTC. In other words, this represents just a slice of the fraud that occurred in 2022.  

Moreover, as we’ve shared before in articles about elder scams, older adults may be less willing or able to report a scam. The reasons vary. They may not know how they were scammed or they may feel shamed by being scammed—all of which can lead to underreporting. Moreover, not every scam report includes an age range, which leads to further underreporting. 

Yet the case is clear. Scams pose a significant threat to older adults. 

Which online scams are targeting grandparents and older adults? 

Looking further into the FTC data, older adults in the U.S. lost more than $1.6 billion to scams in 2022 across four primary categories: 

• Imposter scams – As the name implies, these involve scammers masquerading as legitimate businesses, government agencies, or even friends and family members. Regardless of the guise, the scammers want the same thing—to steal money and personal information from the victim. To do so, scammers may make phony threats as they pose as credit card agents or tax collectors, or they may pretend to be a friend or grandchild in urgent financial need. In these cases, email and social media account for primary contact methods, and payments usually take the form money orders and gift cards as losses from them are difficult to recover. 

• Online shopping scams – These scams take in victims of all ages. Search and social media ads lead victims to bogus websites that sell unique or hard-to-get items, often at a greatly reduced cost. However, once the scammers receive payment, they’ll either deliver low-quality knockoff goods or no goods at all. In the case of counterfeit goods, these scams may be a front for illegal activity and may exploit child labor as well. In the case of non-delivery, organized cybercrime groups often run these scams, operating them much in the same way a legitimate business sells its goods—with marketing teams, web developers, and processes for receiving payment. In short, they can look and act rather sophisticated. 

• Sweepstakes scams – Tough to win a sweepstakes that you never entered. But that won’t stop scammers from saying you have. Victims will get an email or a direct message in social media saying that they’ve won a prize and that all they need to do it claim it. This is where the scammer will ask the victim to provide something, like personal information because the scammer needs it determine their “eligibility”, or their bank account routing information so that the scammer can “send the winnings.” In some cases, they may outright ask victims for money, like a processing fee or a payout for taxes on the (bogus) winnings. 

• Tech support scams – These scams target older adults several ways, such as through links from unsolicited emails, pop-up ads from risky sites, or by spammy phone calls and texts. Here, the scammer will pose as tech support from a known and reputable brand and inform the victim that they have an urgent issue with their computer or device. While the device is actually in fine working order, the scammer offers to “fix” it for a fee. With permission to fix the device given, the scammer either does nothing or, more maliciously, installs malware like adware or spyware on the otherwise healthy device. 

Helping the grandparents and older adults in your life avoid online scams. 

So many scams fail to pass the sniff test. The moment you scrutinize the incredible offer plastered on that ad or question why a so-called tax collector would hound you on social media, something immediately smells fishy. Yet people don’t always catch that whiff. People of all ages. Not just the elders in our lives.  

One way we can help everyone stay safer online is through conversation. The knowledge that comes from a good, ongoing conversation about life online provides them with one pillar of protection. Talking about how they spend their time online and the types of scams that are out there arms them with the savvy they need to spot a scam. That will help them take that crucial moment when faced with a possible scam, a crucial moment to consider if that ad, email, or direct message is indeed bogus. 

The second pillar comes from comprehensive online protection. Today’s protection goes far beyond antivirus. It protects devices the privacy and the identity of the people using them. In the case of our McAfee+ Family plans, they protect up to six people from viruses, credit card fraud, and identity theft with tailored guidance as they do what they do online. With an elder on your family plan, you can see which devices they’ve installed protection on, so you’ll know they’re protected.  

More specific to some of the scams we talked about, it can help block older adults from accessing messages. Further, it can help prevent scam calls and texts in the first place. Personal Data Cleanup spots and removes their personal info from risky data broker sites that spammers use to find victims. And if their personal information has been compromised, our identity monitoring alerts them if their data is found on the dark web, an average of 10 months ahead of similar services—and get expert guidance about what to do next.​ Our identity theft protection and recovery service  identity and credit if the unexpected happens to them. 

Adding a parent to your family plan. 

Adding someone to your McAfee+ Family plan is practically as simple as typing in an email address.  

Think of it as sending an invitation, one where everyone gets their own personalized protection with their own unique login. This way, each member of the family can set up and manage their own protection for their identity, privacy, computers, and phones.  

With this invitation, they’ll see that it comes from you and that all they need to do to start their protection is to click the link—no extra charges or fees. They’re simply part of your plan now.

From there, they can download their protection, set up their devices, and consult their McAfee Protection Score to see how secure they are. Then simple instructions make it easy to set up and fix gaps to improve their online security so that they’re safer still. 

In all, it’s a highly straightforward process, for you and members of your family. 

Protect your family from scams online with the right plan in place. 

Spending any time online calls for online protection, no matter what age you are. While threats may look different across different age groups, every family member faces them. Another thing everyone has in common is that every family member can protect themselves from threats, far more thoroughly now than before. Comprehensive online protection has evolved far beyond antivirus. It protects the person, which is important because that’s who scammers target. They target people, so they can invade their privacy, steal their personal information, or simply rip them off.  

Put plainly, knowing what today’s scams look like and using comprehensive online protection offer a one-two punch in the defense against online scams. You have several options to get it for the older adults in your life, our new McAfee+ Family plans being one of them. Whichever route you take, putting your family’s protection plan in place will absolutely reduce the chances of someone you love getting stung by a scam. 

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A Parent’s Guide to ChatGPT

ChatGPT is, without doubt, the biggest tech story of the year. It’s created debate in schools and universities, made history by being the fastest ever growing app in history and even caused Google to issue a Code Red! But if you haven’t heard anything about it or still can’t get your head around it then I’ve got you! Keep reading because I’ve put together a ‘cheat sheet’ to help get you up to speed plus some pointers on how to manage this intriguing technology and your kids. 

So, what is ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT is an online software program that uses a new form of artificial intelligence – generative artificial intelligence – to provide human style responses to a broad array of requests. And let me assure you, its responses are much less robotic and far more intelligent sounding that earlier iterations of artificial intelligence. Whether you need a recipe formulated, poetry written, tips for your next party or text translated, ChatGPT can assist. Think of it as Google but on steroids. But instead of overwhelming you with 1000’s of search results, it summarises them in a conversational form.  

It was developed by San Francisco startup OpenAI, which was co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015. Like all new startups, it also has a host of investors in tow but Microsoft is without a doubt, the biggest. 

When I asked ChatGPT to describe itself, it replied: 

ChatGPT is a conversational AI model developed by OpenAI. It’s based on the GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) architecture, which is one of the largest and most advanced language models in existence. The model has been trained on a massive corpus of text data from the internet, allowing it to generate human-like responses to a wide range of topics and questions. It can be used to power various applications such as chatbots, language translation, content generation, and more. 

Let me simplify – ChatGPT uses generative artificial intelligence to provide ‘human style’ content, language translation, summarisation ability and search engine results within seconds. It can solve maths questions, write jokes, develop a resume and cover letter, write code and even help you prepare for a job interview. 

How Does It Work? 

ChatGPT is powered by a large language model, or LLM, meaning it’s programmed to understand human language and create responses based on large quantities of data. It has the ability to remember or ‘log’ context from a user’s previous message and use it to create responses later in the conversation, giving it a human-like feel. 

How Popular is it? 

Just five days after its release, ChapGPT had signed up 1 million users, according to a tweet by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman. In just two months, it had amassed a whopping 100 million monthly active users making it the fastest growing application in history. And just to give you some context, it took TikTok nine months to reach 100 million users and two and half years for Instagram. 

Without doubt, the main reasons for its popularity is the ease of access and its seemingly endless scope of ability. It’s super easy to use – once you’ve set up an account, it’s as simple as typing in your request or question into the text box. And there is no minimum age required for users – unlike many other social media platforms. And because it can assist with any issue from writing a legal brief to answering questions to providing companionship in almost 100 languages, a lot of us could easily find a way to use it in our day-to-day lives. 

Some experts believe that the timing of ChatGPT is another reason for its success. It’s widely known that the Renaissance period followed The Black Death in the 14th Century so ChatGPT could have arrived at a time in history when creativity is surging after 2-3 very long and hard years of living with Covid. 

How Much Does It Cost? 

ChatGPT is still a free service however recently it has introduced a premium version called ChatGPT Plus. For $US20 per month, users will get access to the chatbot even when demand is high with a faster response speed. Priority access to new features will also be made available to new users. While I have never had an issue gaining access to ChatGPT, even in peak times, friends of mine in the US have had to invest in the paid membership otherwise they have to wait till late in the evening to have their questions answered! 

Does It Have Any Competitors? 

Microsoft recently announced that it will be incorporating some of the ChatGPT functionality into its Bing and Edge search engines but that it will use a next generation OpenAI model that is more powerful than ChatGPT. If you’re a Microsoft customer, keep a watch on your inbox for an invite! 

Google has just unveiled its offering. Called Bard, it’s similar to ChatGPT but the biggest difference is that it will use current information from the web whereas ChatGPT’s data sources are only current as of September 2021 – I did confirm that with my ChatGPT source!! Bard is projected to be ready for use by the end of February 2023. Interestingly, Google was in fact the first to embrace conversational AI through the launch of Lamda (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) in 2021 but it didn’t launch a consumer version which left a wide opening for ChatGPT to be the first offering in the consumer race. 

As a Parent, What Should I Be Concerned About? 

There’s no doubt that ChatGPT will help fuel a curious mind and be a captivating way to spend time online for inquisitive kids however there are a few things us parents need to be aware of to ensure our kids stay as safe as possible. 

1. When ChatGPT Can Do Your Homework 

Without a doubt, using ChatGPT to write your essay, solve a maths problem or translate your French homework, has been the biggest concern for schools, universities, and parents. Some schools have already banned the use of ChatGPT while others are rewriting curriculums to avoid tasks that could be undertaken by ChatGPT.  

However, it appears that these concerns may be managed with the release of new software that can detect work that has been produced by ChatGPT. Stanford University has just released DetectGPT which will help teachers detect work that was created using the ChatGPT chatbot or other similar large language models (LLMs). ChatGPT has also released its own ChatGPT software detection tool however it does refer to it as ‘imperfect’.   

What To Do – Some experts believe we need to work with ChatGPT and that it in fact could be a powerful teaching tool if it’s embraced and used wisely. Regardless of your thoughts on this, I suggest you work closely with your child’s school to understand what their policy is on its use and encourage your kids to follow it accordingly. 

2. Inappropriate Content 

Even though ChatGPT states that its intention is to ‘generate appropriate and informative responses’, there’s no guarantee that this will always happen. I have spent a considerable time trying to catch it out and I am pleased to report that I couldn’t. It appears that there are certain topics it steers away from and that it does seem to have a good set of boundaries about what questions not to answer or topics to not content on, however don’t rely on these! 

What To Do – If you have concerns, ensure your child has supervision when using ChatGPT. 

3. Chat GPT Doesn’t Always Get It Right 

While ChatGPT’s IQ and scope seems limitless, it isn’t perfect. Not only have there been reports of it being factually incorrect when creating content, its data sources are only current as at September 2021. 

What To Do – Double check the content it creates for accuracy but steer your child towards a reliable and safe source for research projects. 

And my final piece of advice – if you haven’t yet used ChatGPT, make yourself a cuppa and give it a whirl. Like everything in the online world, you need to understand how it works if you want to be able to help your kids stay safe. And if you aren’t sure what to ask it – why not a recipe for dinner? Simply enter what you can find in your fridge in the text box and within seconds, you’ll have a recipe! 

Bon Appetit! 

Alex   

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