Press 1 If You Love Your Lola

By: Melody Rabor-Dizon

 

Auring is 78, takes four heart medications, and keeps a landline because “what if there is an emergency and the cell phone is charging.” Last month she mentioned that she had already talked to the nurse that week. Lovely girl, she said. Very patient. Never interrupted her once.
I checked our records. Nobody from my team had called her.
Auring had been chatting with software. A voice with beautiful manners and no pulse. And honestly? She liked it better than a few humans I have worked with. That is the part we need to talk about.
Thirty years in this profession. I have been hung up on, cried on, bled on, and once outrun by a patient’s rooster during a home visit. “Impersonated
by a computer” was not on the list.
Credit where it is due. AI answers at two in the morning. It speaks Tagalog, Spanish, and Polish without a transfer. It never calls in sick, never sighs, never has a bad day because of the Kennedy. If it had hands, it would wash them the full twenty seconds, every single time.
Which is exactly why the crooks got there first. The same technology that reminds a thousand patients about a flu shot can call a thousand lolas about their Medicare card before lunch. Same tool. Different hands.
The bill is already in. Americans 60 and older filed more than 200,000 fraud complaints with the FBI last year — $7.7 billion gone, the biggest haul of any age group. The Federal Trade Commission traced about $352 million in AI-assisted losses to older adults alone, and admits the real number is higher, because nobody wants to be the cautionary tale at the next family party.
Here is what changed. Cloning a voice used to take a studio and a specialist. Now it takes a few seconds of audio — a voicemail greeting, that videoke clip of your spirited “My Way” at your cousin’s birthday — and a free download. The “grandchild in trouble” call that once sounded like a stranger with a cold now sounds exactly like your apo. Crying. On cue.
Every family I have sat with afterward was intelligent, careful, and completely wrecked. That is the design. This scam does not hunt foolish people. It hunts people who love somebody. Panic shuts off the questioning part of the brain in about eight seconds, which is roughly seven seconds longer than these callers need.
So how do you tell the helper from the hustler? Not by the voice. Those days are over. You tell them apart by what they want from you, and by what happens when you slow down.
A real call from your care team already knows who you are. Your nurse is calling because your blood pressure log came in high and she has your chart open in front of her. She does not need your full Medicare number, your Social Security number, or your bank account to confirm that you are you. She already has all that. She is calling about your ankles.
Which brings me to the most powerful sentence in modern medicine. Write it on the fridge: “I am going to hang up and call the office back myself.”
Say it in English, in Tagalog, in Ilocano. A real nurse will say, yes po, please do — and tell you to look up the number yourself while you are at it. A scammer will suddenly develop a terrible connection. Urgency is the entire business model. Remove it and the call dies on the spot.
I do not think AI is the villain here. Used honestly, it takes the paperwork off my nurses so they can do the work that still requires a human being. Because there is one thing the software still cannot do: hear the pause before a patient says “I’m fine.” The small catch of breath at the end of a sentence. The fact that a woman who has answered on the second ring for six years did not pick up at all today.
A machine hears words. A nurse hears the person saying them.
So answer your phone, kabayan. Just keep one hand on the receiver — and if the voice on the other end is a little too polite, ask it for a pulse.

NURSE’S NOTES:
WHEN THE PHONE RINGS
♥ Hang up. Call back on a number you already have — your card, your statement, your own contacts. Never the number they give you. Rudeness is a very small price for keeping your savings.
♥ Ask straight out: “Am I talking to a person?” An honest system says yes. A crook gets creative.
♥ Medicare does not cold-call you to verify your number. Ever. Check it yourself: 1-800-MEDICARE.
♥ Pick a family code word this week. Not a pet, not your street — those are already online. Pick something too embarrassing for anyone to guess.
♥ Treat the word “immediately” as your cue to move very, very slowly.
♥ Report it: ReportFraud.ftc.gov, your State Senior Medicare Patrol, or AARP Fraud Watch at 1-877-908-3360. No shame — they do this full time. You were just answering your phone.

Stay well, stay curious, and stay unchained. — Melody