About

Listen to this page This recording is of an earlier version of this page.

Why the name says one thing and the site says another

The old saying is trust but verify. We took the name from it, and it's good advice for a slower world.

Then the calls changed. A voice can be copied from a short clip posted online. The story arrives already urgent, and the caller's first instruction is to stay on the line and tell nobody. There's no room left to verify afterward.

So we moved it. Verify first. Trust is still the goal, and you'll still give it to almost everyone you deal with. It just comes second now.

Where this came from

This started as a 25-minute talk. I'm putting it together to give in the activity room of the assisted living community where my parents live.

I work in data protection and privacy. Encryption, passwords, account security, the works. All of that still matters for people of any age, my parents included. But none of it stops a phone call. What stops a phone call is a rule short enough to remember while a stranger is shouting at you.

Building that talk turned into this. A full site, plus the slide deck, script, and printables for anyone who wants to give the same talk themselves. 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. 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. One Rhode Island romance scam cost a widower $80,000. In a "phantom hacker" case, scammers collected $500,000 in gold bullion. Every one collapses at the same point. A number looked up on your own instead of trusted on the call.

Why "Trust But Verify"

Trust but verify translates a Russian proverb, doveryai, no proveryai. It entered American English in the 1980s. It doesn't say trust nobody. It says: keep trusting, just check first.

The rules this site follows

One rule beats a list of forty scams to memorize. That's why the three steps are repeated everywhere. No shame, ever: someone who's already lost money should be able to read any page here without flinching. Free, no products, no sponsors, no affiliate links, nothing sold. No cookies, no accounts, no mailing list. There's one exception, anonymous pageview counts. See privacy for exactly what that means.

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, a senior center, or a nursing home.

You do not need our permission. Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0: keep a small credit line somewhere reasonable ("Adapted from the Trust But Verify Project, trustbutverifyproject.org"), and that's the whole ask. It's fine to use it, print it, or hand it out at a facility that happens to be a business. A nursing home or an assisted living community counts. The license only stops someone from selling this material itself.

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. Every translated page says so at the top, in that language. Don't print or hand out those pages until a native speaker has checked and confirmed them.

45 languages are drafted. Almost none are validated yet. We need readers. One or two hours per language. No qualifications needed. Your name goes on the page only if you want it.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or unclear, tell us. Statistics come from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center and the FTC. We review them 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.

Scams won't stop. The goal is smaller than that. Someone stands in a kitchen, phone against their ear. They glance at a sheet on the fridge. They hang up and call the number on their card instead. That's the whole ambition.