Scam Falcon

Introduction

You shouldn't have to be tech-fluent to avoid scams, Scam Falcon gives everyone the power to spot scams and aims to reduce the $442 Billion lost to scams annually.

Scams take a catastrophic amount of money from our most vulnerable each year. As more life moves online and the number of AI-powered scams increases, the less tech-fluent need more help than ever. Scam Falcon was created to let anyone regardless of their digital confidence, spot and avoid scams.

Inspiration

When visiting my girlfriend's grandma, she asked me to help review some messages she wasn't sure about. It took me all of 10 seconds to sort through her stack of printed messages with some being real bills she needed to pay and some being clear scams. I realised in this moment whilst scam spotting is quite easy for those who grew up with the internet, it's not easy for everyone. After looking into the statistics (those over 60 report an average lose of $38,500 in the US), I realised this problem was doing widespread harm to the most vulnerable in our community.

What it does

Scam Falcon let's anyone regardless of tech fluency check anything they see for scam signs. Simply take a screenshot of anything you're not sure about, tap share then Scam Falcon. We use frontier AI and agentic data confirmation (links, numbers, emails, etc.) to analyse the contents of the screenshot and return a clear Scam or Safe verdict. The Scam Falcon app doesn't need to be open and we teach all users this process.

How we built it

Scam Falcon was built using Swift, SwiftUI and many system APIs and patterns to ensure it was as intuitive to use as possible.

Challenges we ran into

There are certain scenarios where based purely on the information present on screen it's impossible to tell if something is a scam or not. To solve this, in some cases we return an Uncertain answer with a single Yes / No question that will resolve it. Tapping your answer routes you to the resulting Scam / Safe verdict.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The people who can benefit from Scam Falcon the most, usually have less tech experience. Because of this, we needed to design a flow that was easy to use and abstracted away all the complicated stuff to return only a clear verdict. We are really proud of the resulting product.

What's next for Scam Falcon

We plan to expand Scam Falcon's capabilities to allow for live phone call analysis, passive text message filtering and deeper email analysis. We are also implementing feedback from early users to make Scam Falcon even easier to use.