Comment by linsomniac
2 hours ago
A year ago I promoted the idea among my wife's family that we should establish a sign/countersign system for the family and use it regularly so that in the event of something like this we could positively identify a legit request.
Would have come in handy when our niece was traveling in Asia and asked for money a few times, but in this case it wasn't a scam.
I got no traction with it, which I was a bit surprised by because one of the family members works at the Puzzle Palace.
A shared TOTP in an app could also work.
My concern there is that the friction is too high: it wouldn't be something that family members would use in casual conversation, and could also be written off by the AI: "They won't give me my phone", "I lost my phone", etc...
"Did you see that game last night" replied to with "The Visitors are my favorite team" is something you could say instead of "hi" as a family.