Like many of you, I receive an absolute blizzard of email every day. As a random test sample, I ran the last two hours through Claude to analyze the mosh. The discovery: five emails were genuinely dangerous. Designed to extract money, account access, or personal information from whoever opened them. “Anthem Blue Cross” with an “encrypted settlement” waiting for me. Three “government solar grant programs.” One announced that my Norton subscription was expiring, putting my root drive at risk.
Fortunately, I have none of those things: no Anthem anything, no Norton, no solar.
The rest of the inbox — another fifty-odd emails in the same window — was mostly noise. Political fundraising dressed as urgent personal appeals from senators I’ve never met. Retail promotions with fake deadlines. A travel company whose subject line had been deliberately garbled to fool spam filters.
This was not a bad two hours. This was a typical two hours.
I’m on lists I never signed up for, sold to operations I’ve never heard of. And I’m also in a demographic someone has decided is worth targeting.
If you’re in your sixties or beyond, you’re on the same lists.
The security industry has a story it likes to tell about older adults online. The story is that we’re vulnerable — slower reflexes, less tech fluency, more isolation, more trust.1 Sign up for Norton. Get LifeLock. Stay vigilant.
The trouble is that scammers read the same advice.
The moment you follow the recommendation and sign up for a security service, you’ve also set yourself up for every scammer who sends fake renewal notices or “security breach” scares. You now have a Norton subscription to exploit. The fake renewal email lands with new plausibility. Your spam filter is weakened. The legitimate emails multiply — but the fakes now look more credible. So do the calls. The cure has quietly amplified the vulnerability it was meant to prevent.
The snake eating its own tail, with you getting squeezed in the middle.
There is a way out. And you already have it.
Call it the Digital Security Two-Step. Two habits. No sign-up. No software required.
Step one: Get the message — phone or email.
Step two: Don’t answer it.
The key is urgency. They don’t just want to scare you. They want you to act. And the simplest way to make you act is to make you think it’s URGENT.
As a retiree, you have nowhere urgent to be. Which means almost nothing that demands urgent action from you is actually urgent. “Your account will be suspended in 24 hours.” “Respond immediately to claim your settlement.” “This offer expires tonight.” These are not deadlines. They’re mechanisms — designed to interrupt your thinking before you can apply it.
Not even the IRS or the police — common scam impersonations both — come at you by email or phone with an urgent demand. If you’ve genuinely fouled up, they write you. More than once. By the time it’s truly urgent, you already know it.
The antidote isn’t vigilance, exactly. It’s the posture you’ve already earned. When an email demands urgency, the correct response is the one that comes naturally when you genuinely have nowhere to be: take a breath. Look at the actual sender address — not the display name, which anyone can fake, but the domain it actually came from. Anthem Blue Cross sends email from anthem.com, not from secure.net. Norton sends from norton.com, not from a string of random characters. That alone makes the majority of email fraud immediately visible.
If you think there might be a real issue with something you actually own or ordered, go directly to the company’s website — the one where you have your account — and log in. All legitimate messages about your account are there.
As for the phone: don’t answer it when you don’t recognize the number. I know this feels wrong. There’s something in us that treats a ringing phone as a summons — something unfinished if we let it go. Ignore that feeling. It was installed before robocalls existed and it no longer serves you.
Don’t let it rile you, either.
I have a friend who not only answers every unknown call but engages the callers, argues with them, unleashes a vocabulary that would peel paint. He thinks he’s fighting back. What he’s actually doing is adding “live chump” to their list. Every answer signals that the number works and the human on the other end can be rattled. That’s valuable to them. His calls multiply because he keeps proving there’s someone home worth calling.
If the caller is real, they leave a message. If they don’t, they weren’t real, or they weren’t important enough to matter. Either way, your silence has handled it.
Urgency works on people with things to lose from delay — a job, a reputation, a corporate system riding on their quick response. You have no corporate IT to compromise with a hasty click. No professional reputation staked on your response time. Nothing in your inbox requiring action in the next twenty-four hours.*
What retirement gives you — among other things — is permission to be slow. The scammers haven’t built their systems around someone who genuinely has nowhere to be, because most of their targets don’t have that luxury. You do.
Your cardiologist has already told you to take a breath before reacting. Turns out that’s your security protocol too.
1 On the research: Burton et al. (2022), “Exploring how, why and in what contexts older adults are at risk of financial cybercrime victimisation,” Experimental Gerontology, 159, 111678. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2021.111678
* If you have a job like that, I’m sorry. But that’s for a different blog.