Talking to your family about this

Most family online-safety advice is a list of software. Software helps at the margins. What changes outcomes is whether someone will tell you when something has gone wrong, and that is built before anything happens.

The one rule that matters

Nobody gets in trouble for telling you. Say it out loud, to children and to parents, and mean it when it happens.

The reason scams and grooming succeed is almost never that the target was stupid. It is that by the time they realised, they were too embarrassed to say so, and the situation had another week to grow. A household where the first reaction is "thanks for telling me" loses less money and less sleep than one with better filters.

Younger children

Controls do real work here, because the risk is mostly accidental.

• Set up the device as a child account. Both Apple and Google do this properly and free.
• Use the age ratings, and screen-time limits if they help.
• Keep devices in shared spaces where you can see what is happening without inspecting it.
• Turn on your broadband provider's network filtering. BT, Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk all offer it.

Teenagers

Controls largely stop working here, and covert monitoring costs you the thing that actually protects them. Trade it for information.

Worth covering explicitly:

• Anything can be screenshotted, including anything that says it disappears.
• People lie about who they are. Not a lecture — a fact, once, without drama.
• Money requests are a scam pattern, including from a friend's account. Especially from a

friend's account.

• Sextortion is a specific, common crime, and reporting it works. This is the conversation

parents skip and the one that saves lives. The advice is: stop replying, do not pay, screenshot everything, and tell someone. Say it before it is needed.

Older relatives

The pattern is different. Higher losses, better-targeted approaches, and far more phone-based fraud.

Do not lecture. Do this instead:

• Agree a rule in advance: any unexpected call about money ends with "I'll call you back", and

then they call *you*. Having agreed it beforehand makes it easy to do under pressure.

• Tell them banks never ask you to move money to a safe account. The single most useful sentence

in UK fraud prevention.

• Be the person they can ring at 9pm to ask if something is real, without being made to feel

foolish. This one thing outperforms every piece of software on this page.

• Set up two-factor authentication on their email with them, and put the recovery codes somewhere

physical.

Shared practical steps

• A password manager for the household, so nobody is reusing one password across everything.
• Two-factor authentication on email first, then banking.
• Make it normal to forward a suspicious message to a family group before acting on it. Ours is a

free scam checker if you want a second opinion that is not a relative.

What software cannot do

No filter stops a convincing message. No control stops a teenager who wants around it. No VPN stops someone being persuaded. They reduce accidents and exposure, which is worth having — and the thing that stops real harm is a household where saying "I think I've done something stupid" is easy.