Bikini Bottom Twitter

I teach IT to seniors and in the last ~3 years the types of digital trouble my students find themselves in has shifted.

We used to spend a lot of lessons talking about phishing scams, link safety, URL verification, etc. Our pop up sessions would involve lots of calling banks to get cards cancelled after mistakes were made.

But now my lessons are on "oh, that one is a real Toll text, you should have paid that, I know they used to send them in the mail and this text looks like a scam, but that's how they do it now, and you really do owe that money to the police, that's why you're getting phone calls from the police, it's not a spoofing scam, you missed a real toll notice, I'm so sorry, it was buried in your spam folder"

Older people got the memo about scams and they got block happy, now they ignore real notices.

I've done the same thing, I was getting texts for parking fines and permit renewals and I don't have a lisence because I'm visually impaired so obviously a scam.

Only I forgot that when I was 16 grandma gave me her old car, I was like "the fuck do I do with this" so I gave the keys to my little brother and moved out.

15 years later, turns out the car has been in my name the whole time, which makes sense, I don't remember signing anything about the car ever. My brother had no idea his permit was even expired because they were sending the text to the owner contactvia the car rego, not the drivers contact details my brother provided, and because I'd been ignoring the texts it took a while to iron out with the council, especially because my brother and "my" car are not just in another state, but another territory.