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does the average person actually process 'contact' as "person contacts me when i wasn't doing anything related to the company they say they're from" 
like i think that's the big problem with phishing is that a ton of people just do not realize that no business wants to talk to you, that that's largely a thing of the past
idk like i guess this isn't quite true it's just. this is an unwinnable situation. keeping track of what is and isn't secret information is a shitshow. passwords are fuckin dumb and idk what to do about it.
"we'll never call you and ask for this number, this number, or this word. but we WILL call you and demand other information before we'll tell you the thing we called about. that other information? keep that secret too."
the problem is mostly that we don't have INBOUND passwords. businesses don't have to authenticate THEMSELVES to contact us, and if they did, nobody would make the time to verify it
when a hospital calls me for bill collection they ask for my date of birth. why? i don't know who they are. i should be able to challenge. "you tell me <blah> and i'll tell you what you want." but that's also impossible.
like, they're already asking for bad verification info, but pretty much anything that wouldn't be infuriating to keep track of would be public record.
by the time we're done with this conversation i've invented asymmetric cryptography and, you know, that was created to solve a specific problem and does it shockingly well. like, we somewhat solved identity, and found out the solution is still obnoxiously tedious.
and this is why businesses started communicating largely through their websites - it's the only way to frontload an SSL key into a person. it is the best solution to this problem that exists, but we can't cancel telephones
of course the actual solution is to not have single call centers handling interactions with customer bases measured in the millions so that it becomes unreasonable that you would get a call from a person you don't know in another state or country
but shrinking society is impossible unless we uninvent industry so
