Teaching kids to spot scams: why financial safety is part of financial literacy
I read in the news this week about international police raids dismantling massive romance scam syndicates across Southeast Asia. It reminded me how far we’ve come since Nigerian princes used to email me - in poorly written English - asking for my bank details to help them escape a civil war. They were easy to spot, but somehow people still fell for them.
Then came the poorly designed spoofs of bank and Microsoft landing pages. Clearly fake, and yet people still fell for those too. Today, AI-generated avatars, cloned voices, and hyper-professional phishing emails circulate on a permanent basis. The gap between real and fake has never been smaller.
Financial literacy isn’t just about learning how money works. It also means knowing how to keep it safe. And unlike our generation - who gained exposure to these threats gradually, over decades. Today’s children face a baptism of fire with no gradual education to draw on.
Here are three practical steps worth putting in place now:
Set up a family password
AI can now clone a person’s voice from a three-second video clip. We can no longer completely trust audio alone. I proposed a secret word or phrase known only to our immediate family (hopefully we never need to use it!). If your child ever receives a frantic call or message claiming to be from a parent, relative, or close friend demanding money or account access, they must ask for the family password. No password, no action. Full stop.
Practice the “hang up and call back” rule
Scammers rely on urgency. They tell children their bank account is frozen, or that they face legal trouble unless they act immediately. Teach your kids that banks, tech companies, and government agencies will never pressure anyone into immediate financial action over the phone or via a chat app. If an authority figure calls out of the blue, the rule is simple: hang up politely, find the official number on the company’s real website, and call back independently.
Look for the uncanny valley in video and audio
Deepfakes are convincing but imperfect. Tell your children to look and listen carefully. In video calls: watch for unnatural blinking, odd lighting around the mouth, or an absence of genuine emotion. In audio calls: listen for a flat robotic cadence, unnatural pauses before complex words, or the complete absence of background noise. If something feels slightly off, it probably is. Trust the instinct.
I’ve been thinking about this problem long enough that I built something around it. Morechard is a family finance app designed to make the connection between money, effort, and reward visible again - for kids and parents alike. If that resonates, take a look.