Suraksha Setu

A patient teen scam buddy that keeps grandparents from losing their savings to online fraud.

Inspiration

We built this because it is something we already do out of love. One of us caught a scam call that nearly tricked our grandmother into reading out her bank OTP, and we realised our whole extended family leans on the youngest tech helper for exactly these moments. If we already do it for free for our own family, we can do it well for other worried families and charge a fair price.

What it does

Suraksha Setu is a teen-run scam-safety coaching service for seniors. A senior gets a one-time home setup that locks down their phone and saves real family numbers, a laminated STOP before you pay cheat-sheet in their own language, and a monthly on-call teen buddy they can message the moment a suspicious request arrives. The web app demos the core is-this-real check, a family dashboard for the paying adult child, and clear pricing.

How we built it

Next.js 14 with the App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and a small shadcn-style component set. The scam checker runs a built-in keyword-and-weight analyzer so it works fully offline, and upgrades to a live OpenAI reading when a judge pastes their own key in Settings. The key lives in localStorage and is sent per request as a header, never stored server-side. It ships as a standalone Docker image.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping the scam checker genuinely useful without any paid API was the main one, so we wrote a weighted heuristic that recognises the real scam patterns seniors face in India. We also made the app degrade gracefully: if a live AI call fails, it silently falls back to the built-in analyzer instead of breaking.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The product feels alive on first run with realistic seeded families, buddies, and a log of real scam messages. The heuristic correctly flags digital-arrest, KYC, lottery, and family-emergency scams, and the STOP cheat-sheet is printable. Every button and link does something real.

What we learned

Seniors do not fail at tech because they are careless, they fail because scammers manufacture panic and urgency. Designing for a calm pause, the STOP habit, matters more than any feature. On the build side we learned to keep the app honest about demo mode versus live mode so nothing ever looks broken.

What's next for Suraksha Setu

• Add WhatsApp and voice-note intake so seniors can forward a message straight to their buddy
• Multi-language cheat-sheet generation for the top ten Indian languages
• A buddy training and certification flow to scale building-by-building
• Optional deepfake and AI-voice detection for call recordings
• A simple family billing and subscription flow

Built With

• class-variance-authority
• docker
• lucide-react
• next.js-14
• react
• tailwindcss
• typescript