Why I Built ScamDrill

The moment everything changed

I discovered my 85-year-old father had been quietly draining his bank account for months. Not because he was careless or forgetful. He was alert, intelligent, and had managed his finances his entire life. But he had been signed up—without realizing it—for a series of unnecessary technical support services. Hundreds of dollars every month, recurring charges he thought were legitimate protection for his computer.

When I found out, I felt something shift inside me. Anger at the scammers who had exploited his trust. Helplessness at how easily they had done it. And guilt—a gnawing guilt that I hadn't caught it sooner, that I hadn't prepared him for what's become a daily threat for people of his age.

Why warnings fail

I realized something important that day: my father knew to be careful. He'd heard warnings. He understood that scams exist. But knowing isn't the same as recognizing. Scammers are professionals who have studied trust, authority, and urgency. They craft emails that look like they come from the IRS. They create text messages that appear to be from your bank. They build profiles of their targets and tailor their approach. Against that kind of sophistication, generic warnings don't work. People don't fail because they're naive. They fail because they're human.

And my father wasn't alone. Millions of families are facing this exact scenario right now. Older adults losing tens of thousands of dollars to fraud. But it's not just seniors anymore. Gen-Z is three times more likely to fall for scams than older generations—they're targets for social media phishing, fake job offers, and cryptocurrency cons. Teenagers are receiving DMs from accounts that look like celebrities, asking them to verify their identity. The threat isn't confined to one age group. It's everywhere.

The idea

I started thinking about what actually works. We use fire drills to prepare for fires we hope never come. We practice emergency procedures. We prepare for worst-case scenarios, not because we expect them to happen, but because when they do, we're ready. What if we could do the same for scams?

The idea was simple: what if people could practice recognizing scams before encountering real ones? Not with lectures or warnings, but with realistic, safe simulations that teach through experience. What if each person could learn at their own pace, in their own context, and receive immediate, kind feedback when they made mistakes?

ScamDrill was born from that question. It's a scam awareness training service that sends realistic but completely safe simulated scam emails and texts—tailored for the age group being trained. If someone clicks on a simulated scam, they don't fall into a trap. They see a warm, educational explanation of what happened and why. If they spot it and report it, they get positive reinforcement. Over time, they build real recognition skills that carry over to the real world.

What we believe