Scammers will scam and, no matter how careful you are, it’s possible to get scammed.

Here’s another anecdote - my wife’s parents are in their eighties, and they are paranoid about being scammed. They don’t have internet banking, they pay as much as possible by cash, and they pay all their bills - gas & electricity, water & sewage, yadda yadda - at the post office. They won’t have a contactless debit card and still have the kind where you have to stick it in the machine and enter the PIN, and they won’t have a credit card at all. They don’t do internet purchasing.

But their bank account was hacked, and around a thousand pounds siphoned off. Of course they never found out how it was done, but a few months earlier there had been a massive breach of their ISP’s system, which leads one to believe that’s how someone got hold of their bank details. But that’s just a suspicion, and I guess they will never know the facts. Fortunately, their bank refunded the lost money.

No matter how careful you are, or how you allow paranoia to rule your financial doings, you will never be 100% safe.