For years, the standard advice on the grandparent scam had a comforting flaw built right into it. The reassurance was always some version of “I would know my own grandchild’s voice.” That used to be true enough to lean on. It isn’t anymore. The grandparent scam is the call where someone claims a loved one…
You almost tapped it. That’s the part worth thinking about. A text lands while you’re in the middle of something else. A package can’t be delivered. A toll went unpaid. Your bank flagged a charge. Your thumb is already drifting toward the link before the rest of your brain has caught up. Most people stop…
Most warnings about job offer scams stop at the fake check. You get “hired,” a check shows up, you’re told to deposit it and wire part of it back, the check bounces a week later, and you’re on the hook for the money. That con is real and it still works. But it’s not the…
If you’re reading this right after clicking something you wish you hadn’t, take a breath. The click itself is rarely the disaster. I spent more than twenty years building the products that are supposed to catch this kind of thing, and one of the more useful things I can tell you is that a phishing…
Most people picture a scam victim as someone careless. Someone who wasn’t paying attention, or didn’t know any better. After 20 years building and watching these products from the inside, I can tell you that’s not who gets caught. The people who lose money to a government impersonation call are usually careful, responsible adults who…
The FTC recorded 64,003 romance scam reports in 2023, with total losses of $1.14 billion. The median reported loss was $2,000, the highest of any imposter scam category. Those are official figures. AARP research found that 55 percent of adults 50 and older who lost money in a romance scam didn’t report it anywhere. The…
The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center report recorded 47,794 complaints tied to tech support fraud, with about $2.13 billion in reported losses. Among victims 60 and older, tech and customer support scams alone produced more than $1 billion in losses from about 21,000 complaints. Here’s the thing the headline numbers don’t show: the “tech…
If you’re looking for practical ways to protect an aging parent from scams, the FBI’s most recent elder fraud report offers a sobering backdrop: $7.7 billion in losses from more than 201,000 complaints by victims 60 and older in 2025 alone. That’s a 37 percent jump from the year before, and the average loss now…