International Day of Older Persons: Top Tips to Keep Seniors Safe Online

On October 1st, the world celebrated the International Day of Older Persons. This international day was initiated by the United Nations. It is estimated that there are almost 700 million people over the age of 60 worldwide, and this number is rapidly growing every year.

But older people are the sweet target for fraudsters. Scammers use technology to target older people because they often aren’t well informed on online security and privacy. According to the FBI’s data released this year, older adults lost $342 million to scam in 2017. On average, each victim suffered a loss of nearly $7,000, which could have bought them a two-week trip abroad for two.

And this is happening not only in the United States, but in other Western countries as well.

Daniel Markuson, digital privacy expert at NordVPN, provides you with some tips on how older adults can stay safe online. Be aware of them and if needed, explain them to your parents, grandparents or older neighbors.

Here are the top tips to keep older adults safe online:

Find trusted support and help.

If you get any notifications or calls about viruses on your computer or various fixes that should be made to your gears, it might be fraud. Be careful to use only official support services or consult someone you know and trust—for example, your children, other relatives or even younger colleagues or neighbors. Technical support scam is the fourth most popular scam in the United States and gaining in popularity worldwide.

Be very careful on free public WiFi.

Found free WiFi at a restaurant, café or even library? Enjoy it! But do that carefully. Just don’t log into your personal accounts or online banking when on free public WiFi – that makes it easy for hackers to steal your sensitive or financial data. Additionally, use a VPN (or as it is called in full—Virtual Private Network), like NordVPN, for an extra layer of protection. It will protect your devices and will encrypt your online activities from online snoopers, hackers and other shady personalities.

Use strong passwords and change them time to time.

Use longer phrases or words with numbers and other symbols for passwords. What is even more important, don’t share your login details with anyone. Literally, anyone. Do your best to use different passwords for different accounts and change them time to time. What is more, always protect all of your devices with passwords or patterns.

Email safety first: Don’t trust those shady emails.

The first rule: ignore urgent email requests, especially from those senders that you don’t know. If an email sender is asking you to take immediate action, it’s probably might be a fraud. Don’t reply to such messages, don’t click on links or buttons, and don’t download any attachments. What is the most important—do not provide any personal or financial details. Remember, a legitimate business will never ask you to send sensitive information over the email.

Always protect your money.

Don’t send money to people you don’t know over the Internet. When shopping online or doing online banking, make sure the checkout address starts with HTTPS—the S is for “secure.” All those scammy letters claiming you won a zillion or a new iPhone are surely fake.

About NordVPN

NordVPN is the world’s most advanced VPN service provider that is more security oriented than most VPN services. It offers double VPN encryption, ad blocking & Onion Over VPN. The product is very user-friendly, offers one of the best prices on the market, has over 5,000 servers worldwide and is P2P friendly. One of the key features of NordVPN is zero log policy. For more information: nordvpn.com.