‘I’m Old, Not an Idiot.’ One Man’s Protest Gets Attention of Spanish Banks

You pay some guy to drive around and stuff your envelopes into various post boxes 500-1000 at a time.

Or just find an insider at the postal service of your choice, crime forums are full of people offering this.

If you’re capable of accepting payments for fake bills, you already have people walking into banks with fake IDs to open accounts. Sending out letters is significantly less complex.

> b) (The worrying bit, if you're a scammer) - You've just gone from attempted fraud (sending out scam emails) to defrauding the postal service of whatever country you try to pull this one off in; the authorities are quite likely to take a dim view of your efforts.

Probably not, considering the amount of crimes involved in accepting money transfers to a drop account created with fake documents and the subsequent money laundering.

Defrauding the postal service is small potatoes.

Old people are exactly the type of people that would carefully study letters that come in the post. Unlike people my age that would bin anything that comes with the bill thinking it's probably just commercial crap.

But of course this is precisely the reason they do it by email. Dark pattern..

One of the persons in my sample is my father. He had an introduction to what must have been OS/2 Warp and even had a computer in the office, but never used it (there was still a secretary). In his retirement, he bought a book binder course on how to use an early version of Windows, but hadn't a computer to try it on his own, so this was yet again theoretical and mostly forgotten. At around 80, he finally acquired a laptop, but 10 years later he's essentially at the level described above. (Windows nowadays changing some of its metaphors on a regular basis, doesn't help.) On the other hand, at the age of 90, he's still able to adopt to the interface of a new camera. Partly, because camera UIs tend to be designed more on the principle of providing the least of an interference and mental load as possible, but also because he loves photography.

It is important to note that computing isn't a prime occupation for this generation: Yes, it's something they could do, yes, there may be interesting things, they try to participate, but overall, they can do without it and discovery is difficult, therefor, there's never an ultimate urge to adopt. Conversely, they are reduced to the most basic skill level, which doesn't especially promote interest, which in turn hinders progress. You could say, computers are inverse gamification devices for them. This is something to keep in mind, when designing accessible operations.

Edit: Adding alleged ease-of-access layers doesn't help. E.g., as may be inferred from the above, archiving and reviewing photos is a favorite occupation on the computer. Transferring and navigating stored photos is complex in its own and eventually mastered to a certain degree. (Still, I keep fixing the same míshaps.) However, adding layers like camera roll, moments or automatic links in the favorites bar, which eventually obscure the custom links placed for ease of access, doesn't help at all. On the contrary, it's just an opaque distraction and obstruction, which will be ignored at best, but will add to the confusion at least, because of their inherent time-based instability in what is supposed to be a stable layer of access. (Also, the "magical" appearance and disappearance of these items doesn't help the ability to form a stable mental model.) Don't do this, provide functionality like this as an option only. (Or, at least, have options to disable this.)

What do you mean by off-topic? Businesses receive utility bills too, and might genuinely be required to keep records of those.

As far as I can tell, barring some very special circumstances, individuals never need to keep such records.