The thing about scams that's fascinating, from a research point of view, is that they're the flavor of digital nastiness that targets individuals rather than corporations.
The thing about scams that sucks is that they are hoovering up significant amounts of cash from everyday people, resulting in serious life consequences.
The thing about scams that's awesome is that the vast majority of them can be utterly stopped by cultivating this one, weird habit…
Don't click on the link
That's it. If you're a normal person living a normal life — and not, like, an investigative reporter or spy or something — you can eliminate the vast majority of scam exposure by just not clicking on incoming links. (But wait, aren't the links in this newsletter coming into your inbox? Well, yes. I’m talking about the text with the “OMG CLICK THIS URGENTLY!!!!!” link. Those folks are scammers.)
Incoming links are sneaky little data packages, and we've gone deep on that before.
We've been trained and conditioned to respond to emails and texts like they're all legitimate. But we know not to respond to junk mail, right? We have the skills. We have the discernment. Keeping yourself safe from scams is simply leveling this up.
This is especially true for the Offline Generation that came of age before the internet — the folks for whom messages from machines are still somewhat magical.
Enchanted by email
Back at the turn of the prior century, mail was a big deal. It was precious, hard to come by, and when it showed up, it meant something. My great grandmother, who lived on a ranch in rural Montana, spoke in glowing, reverent terms about the first time she got a Sears-Roebuck catalog in the mail. For those folks, mail never really lost that Christmas-like surprise-and-joy effect.
A generation or two later, mail wasn't really a thing, but phone calls were still amazing.
And then computers happened. And for the generations that were adults when that happened, email never really lost that Christmas-like surprise-and-joy effect.
You see where I'm going with this, right? Media that existed when I was a child isn't interesting, it's ubiquitous. Media that was created during my lifetime is amazing. So you can't really blame the people who grew up before the internet for being a little awestruck by technology. To them, receiving an email with a link in it is still a magical thing. Convincing them otherwise is hard — but it's one of the most important digital safety conversations you can have with someone you love.
Why this is so important right now
Eight billion reasons
The 2025 FBI IC3 report just came out, and the elder fraud statistic is $8 billion lost by elderly people due to scams.
Eight. Billion.
Makes me angry. Makes me want to teach everyone to not click on links. Heyyyyy, that's what I'm doing.
But what about actual hacking?
As I was writing this piece, this came across my feed. A leaked government hacking tool that can compromise iPhones. Sounds terrifying — and I want you to keep reading, because the punchline is genuinely satisfying.
It all hinges on this one line: "when it visits a website containing the exploitation code."
There you are. The tool does not work unless you click on a compromised link. Yes, it's more work and more hassle to type in URLs and navigate to necessary content directly — but it's also way more secure. Even the scary government stuff requires the click.
What can I do about it?
Help your elders understand that there is a literal zero chance that something important to their life arrives by way of a random text. Teach them to always go directly to the source to confirm anything. Teach them to screencap and send. Teach them to be scam-resilient. Send them a copy of this newsletter.
But most importantly? Never click on links in email or in texts. As we've written before, links are sneaky. If you click on a link with a bunch of junk after a ? (like, say, every Amazon link ever), you're broadcasting all kinds of information to all kinds of places.
Every one of the scams that built that $8 billion number started with someone clicking a link.
The people you love don't have to be part of that number. And honestly? You're probably the only person in their life who's going to tell them so. That's not a burden — that's a superpower. Use it.
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