'Computer voice' tries extorting money from a grandma — only to get scammed by her broken English and Oscar-level acting

One scammer must have been thinking that the old woman was weak and vulnerable, and therefore, an easy target to extract some money from. Little did he know that her very vulnerabilities would turn the tables on him, leaving him embarrassed and without any money whatsoever. In an April 7 post, a Reddit user (u/Wuffelscosplay) shared this instance about their friend’s grandma, who ended up scamming the scammer. The story prompted a whimsical discussion about scammers and the elderly.

According to the Reddit user's post, their friend’s grandma was working on her laptop when she needed to go to Google Maps. Mistaking something else for the Maps app, she clicked on a web page, and a voice started talking to her from the laptop, out of nowhere. "He told her to call a specific number to fix a problem that is occurring," the post read. Grandma did what most old folks do and trusted the voice and obeyed.

"The dude told her to pay him a specific amount of money so her problem could be fixed by him," the author shared. Lucky for her, her broken English came to her advantage and bailed her out of the scammer’s trap. The Reddit user mentioned that the grandma is an immigrant but speaks English just like her native language, slightly broken. So, instead of falling for the trap, she started pretending to speak her usual broken English.

The grandma kept dilly-dallying with self-pitying statements, saying she had no money, and she was poor. The guy, apparently, got mired in his own plot and assured her that he’d fix the problem for free. The grandma pulled an “UNO reverse card,” as the friend described it.

While the smart grandma saved herself, countless elderly individuals in the world become victims of scams like these. Their accumulated savings, cognitive declines, and social isolation make them luring and easy targets for swindlers. A 2023 study published in JAMA Network reveals that about 5-10% of the elderly adult population reports being victims of financial scams. Another study published in Frontiers surveyed 471 retired individuals and found that they are frequent targets of online health scams, given their social media use, app installations, poor digital protection skills, and neediness.

In response to the grandma’s story, readers brought up instances from their own lives. u/Only-Onion7998 described that the scammers “talk to a person and learn what to say, and the program knows exactly what to say to get money from people after learning certain things from the conversation. They can mimic loved ones’ voices like a daughter calling mom asking for money cause she is in a bind and can even fake video calling. The ability of these programs is very impressive and scary, and that's why elderly people are tricked so often.” 

u/Araxanna explained, "There are websites that play that audio in the background to fool you into thinking you have an issue when you don’t. My mum used to click on Facebook links all the time and she came across several of these. I would tell her to close the web browser and the voice magically shut off. Voila!"

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