When Computer Science teacher Kendall Murphy opened her computer to check for important emails one summer day, she wasn’t expecting to see photos of her house in her inbox.
Driven by curiosity, she clicks on the email.
She can feel her stomach drop.
A threatening letter, completed with her full name, address and a street view of her house, stares back at her. The letter demands that Murphy pays a certain amount of money to an unknown user and threatens to harm her if she doesn’t.
Even for Murphy, who teaches how to safely use the internet and avoid bad actors to middle schoolers, this personalized attack was something new–something that really shook her to her core.
“It scared me to death,” Murphy said. “I actually called the police, and it turned out that it was a scam and they had other people calling too. It’s important for people to understand that if you’re not sure whether something is a scam, you should call someone who could help you. If you see a red flag, talk to someone.”
Similar scams that take advantage of a person’s emotions or qualities have become increasingly prevalent with the increasing amount of personal information available on the internet, and with the rise of Artificial Intelligence, they’re especially dangerous due to their claims often feeling more legitimate than traditional scams.
“Scammers are salespeople,” Murphy said. “They’re trying to sell their scam to the right person, so they choose who to scam very carefully, but it depends: the threatening email I got was just an AI bot that just sent out as many emails as possible. If you really research it, though, a lot of the time you’re going to realize that something is a scam–it goes back to checking your sources.”
And although students are certainly at risk of falling for these scams, especially younger kids, older people are the most vulnerable. According to the National Council on Aging, Americans over the age of 60 lost roughly $3.4 billion in total fraud losses in 2023. Due to older people sometimes struggling to adapt to new technologies, scammers target this vulnerable group in particular to try and easily make money.
With the recent Los Angeles wildfires, for example, scammers have been creating fake PayPal accounts under celebrity names to incentivize people to donate money to these causes, using the name to try and foster a sense of trust that many people may fall for.
Rekha Garadi, grandmother of Amar Kakkar ‘25, almost fell for one of these scams, and she has also noticed a steady increase in the number of scams every year.
“I almost fell for the wildfire scam myself,” Garadi said. “I looked up the website, and I was going to donate, but I said, ‘I don’t know where this money’s going and who it’s going to,’ so I backed out.”
The best way to avoid these malicious schemes is often to get another set of qualified eyes on them, such as a knowledgeable friend, teacher or even law enforcement if the scam is especially dangerous or threatening.
“I used to get a lot of texts and phone calls with my area code, and I used to answer them,” Garadi said. “But then somebody told me to never reply to them because they were scams–even if they were really personal messages, so now I’ve learned to not answer if I don’t have a contact name associated with the number.”
But sometimes enlisting the help of others isn’t an option, so students and senior citizens alike must use their risk evaluation skills quickly and effectively, an ability that Murphy aims to teach to her students through education digital citizenship units.
“Every year we do digital citizenship, covering how you should handle yourself as a marksman online by acting out scenarios you might find yourself in,” Murphy said. “After that, we go into our internet safety and source evaluation unit. My hope is that the boys will be able to help others since they’re being presented with so many possible situations, so if they see something suspicious they’ll be able to recognize that and say something.”
A large part of staying safe on the internet, regardless of someone’s age, is keeping private information–like addresses, passwords or other personal details off the web, where they are saved and stored forever. This philosophy is key to Murphy’s lessons, where she teaches marksmen the importance of using social media in healthy, safe ways in a time where so many people live their realities through apps like Instagram and TikTok.
“You have to be really careful because there are some situations they’re just too young to hear about, but I’m very serious with them,” Murphy said. “I posted things on Facebook when it had just come out when I was a freshman in college, and you can imagine that we didn’t understand back then that once you put something out there it’s out there forever and that it can affect your future.”
But even with these lessons and education, students and parents should be aware of the potential dangers affiliated with reputable platforms like YouTube and PayPal that bad actors can use with malicious intent while under the disguise of someone like an internet influencer.
“My son is 8 and he loves YouTube, but even if I put the YouTube restrictions on, I can’t control everything that he’s seeing,” Murphy said. “So I think it comes down to teachers and parents to protect our boys when they can but also to teach them how to be leaders in a digital environment.”
