About

Where this came from

This started as a 25-minute talk I gave in the activity room of the assisted living community where my parents live.

I work in data protection and privacy, which mattered less than I expected. Nobody in that room needed encryption. They needed a rule short enough to remember while a stranger was shouting at them on the phone.

The talk went well. People asked for something to hand a neighbor. Then it became this. More about me on LinkedIn.

This happens to families like yours

A great-uncle took out a reverse mortgage — $300,000 of his house, gone. A coworker's father was on the phone with "Microsoft," being walked into his bank account, until she caught the call in time. A coworker's daughter sent money for months to a boyfriend she'd never met, "working in Oman."

None of them are foolish. This project exists so you can catch it the way that coworker did — in the moment, not after.

The same patterns show up constantly in federal prosecutions: a Rhode Island romance scam that cost a widower $80,000, a "phantom hacker" case where scammers collected $500,000 in gold bullion. Every one collapses at the same point: a number looked up independently instead of trusted on the call.

Why "Trust But Verify"

Most scam education has a tone problem. It tells older adults that the world is full of predators and they are the prey, and that message does two things: it frightens people, and it insults them. Frightened, insulted people don't change their habits. They stop listening.

Trust but verify is the translation of a Russian proverb — doveryai, no proveryai — that entered American English in the 1980s. It says something better: keep trusting. Trust is not the mistake. Just check first.

That distinction is the whole project.

What we believe

People are not the weak link. They're the last line of defense, standing against an industry that took $7.7 billion from Americans over 60 in a single year. Blaming them for losing a fight they were never resourced for is both unkind and useless.

One rule beats a hundred warnings. Nobody remembers a list of forty scams. Everybody can remember three steps.

Shame is the scammer's ally. It keeps people quiet, which keeps money unrecovered and crews unreported. Every page here is written so someone who has already lost money can read it without flinching.

Repetition, not novelty. The same three steps, said many times, in many languages, on many refrigerators.

What this will never be

• Never a business. No products, no premium tier, no affiliate links, no referral fees, no sponsors, and no "recommended service" that pays us.
• Not a data collector, and honest about the one exception. No cookies, no accounts, no mailing list, nothing sold, nothing shared. We keep an anonymous count of how many people read each page — no name attached, no way to trace it back to you. A site about protecting your information should say plainly what little it keeps.
• Never fear-based. Fear is the scammer's instrument. We won't borrow it.

Use anything here

Everything on this site is free to print, copy, translate, adapt, rebrand, and distribute. Put your organization's name on it. Change the wording. Hand it out at a church, a library, a clinic, a union hall, a family dinner.

You do not need our permission and you don't need to credit us. If a sentence here ends up on someone's refrigerator without our name attached, that's the project working exactly as intended.

About the translations

Everything on this site that isn't in English was translated by AI and has not been validated by a native speaker. We say so at the top of every translated page, in that language, and those pages are not to be printed or distributed until we have validation and confirmation from a native speaker.

That's a deliberate choice. A page about who to trust cannot itself be something you have to take on faith. If we can't vouch for it, we say we can't.

Twelve languages are drafted and none is validated. That ratio is the wrong way round, and only a native speaker can fix it.

We need readers. One or two hours per language, no professional qualification needed, name on the page only if you want it.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or unclear, we want to know. Statistics come from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center and the FTC, and get reviewed every April when the new federal reports come out.

Where the numbers come from

• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Annual Report and Elder Fraud section
• Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Sentinel and Protecting Older Consumers
• Department of Justice, Elder Justice Initiative

We use federal data only, and we say the year.

What we think will actually happen

Not that scams end. They won't.

But somewhere, someone will be standing in a kitchen with a phone against their ear and a frightened feeling in their chest — and they'll glance at a piece of paper on the refrigerator and say the sentence out loud: "I'm going to hang up and call the number on my card."

That's a person who just kept their savings. That's the entire ambition.