Yes, hang up. If a call opens with "Can you hear me?" or "Is this you, Grandma?" from a number you don't recognize, especially one that looks local, don't answer the question. That's the setup for what's called the Say Yes scam, and it's been making the rounds again this year, hitting Florida especially hard because of the retiree population there and how many people still answer landlines.
How the Say Yes Scam Actually Works
The call comes in from a spoofed number, meaning it's faked to look like a local area code, sometimes even a number close to your own. You pick up. The caller asks a simple yes-or-no question. You say "yes." That's the whole first move. The call is being recorded, and that recorded "yes" is the thing they wanted.
From there it goes one of two ways. The call ends abruptly, or it gets handed off to a live person who keeps you talking, often claiming to be from your bank, a utility company, or a mortgage lender, trying to pull out account numbers, your address, or anything else useful for identity theft.
Why Florida Retirees Are the Main Target
This isn't random. Older adults answer unknown calls at much higher rates than younger people, because most of us were raised to pick up the phone when it rings.
Florida in particular has a large retiree population and unusually heavy landline use, which is exactly the combination scammers are fishing for. A spoofed local area code works better on someone who still trusts caller ID and still answers unfamiliar local numbers out of politeness or habit.
The Part of This Scam That's Genuinely Overblown
Here's where I'll push back a little. The scariest version of this story says a recorded "yes" alone can authorize charges on your accounts or slip past a bank's voice verification. I looked for confirmed cases of that exact mechanism actually draining someone's account from a recording of the word "yes" by itself, and it's thin.
The FCC and BBB have warned about this pattern for years precisely because it keeps resurfacing, not because there's a pile of documented victims losing money from the recording alone.
The real damage almost always comes from what happens after the "yes," when a live scammer gets you on the phone and talks you into giving up real information, or walks you through moving money yourself. The recorded yes is the hook. The conversation that follows is the actual scam. Don't let the recording part scare you more than the much more ordinary trick that follows it.
What to Tell Your Parents This Week
Have this exact conversation with them: if an unknown number calls and opens with a yes-or-no question, don't answer it, just hang up.
If they think it might be legitimate, they can call the bank or company back directly using the number printed on a statement or the back of their card, never a number the caller gives them.
That one habit closes off both the recording and the follow-up conversation at the same time.