Teaching a child to spot a scam message
Short answer
Teach the shape of a scam rather than a list of examples. Four tells cover most of what a child will meet: it arrives unprompted, it creates urgency, it asks for something private, and it insists on secrecy. Practising those on real messages together works better than warnings, because the child has to make the judgment while you are still in the room.
The instinct is to show a child examples. This is what a scam looks like, do not click that link.
It ages badly. Examples date within months, and the ones aimed at children have long since stopped looking like the Nigerian prince most adults picture. A child who has memorised five examples is defenceless against the sixth.
Shape travels better than examples.
Four tells that hold up
Each of these is checkable by a ten-year-old without any technical knowledge.
It came to you. You did not go looking. Almost everything genuinely good online is something the child sought out. A message that arrives unprompted from someone they do not know starts at suspicious, whatever it contains.
It is in a hurry. Urgency is the load-bearing part of nearly every scam, because thinking is what defeats it. Offers that expire, accounts closing, someone in trouble right now. Real things wait ten minutes.
It wants something private. A photo, an address, a password, a code from a text. Anything that only they have.
It wants to be a secret. This is the one worth drilling hardest. Any message that says do not tell your parents has, by that sentence alone, identified itself. There is no benign version of that request from a stranger.
Practising instead of warning
A warning is a rule. Spotting a scam is a judgment, and judgment only develops by being exercised.
The version that works is unglamorous. When a suspicious message reaches your own phone, show the child. Ask which of the four tells apply before you say what you think. Let them be wrong occasionally, because being wrong with a parent present is the cheapest possible way to learn this.
Two or three minutes, a few times a month, and the child has run the drill dozens of times before anything real arrives. That is a different state of readiness from having been told.
The specific threat to prepare for
Most current scams aimed at teenagers are not after money directly. They are after an image, which is then used to demand money.
NCMEC received more than 50,000 reports of financially motivated sextortion in 2025 — an average of 137 a day, up from more than 36,000 the year before. The approach usually comes through a fake account on a platform the child already uses, and the escalation from friendly to threatening is fast.
Three things a child should have heard from you before this happens:
- An image request is a stop signal, always, including from someone whose profile looks familiar.
- If an image has already been sent, it is not over and it is not their fault. Offenders rely on the belief that it is.
- They can tell you and keep the phone. If the expected cost of telling you is losing the device, many children will try to solve it alone, and alone is where it gets worse.
Why teach this at all rather than block it
A filter cannot evaluate intent inside an approved app, and the messages that matter arrive there.
The child is the only one in the conversation. Everything else is scaffolding around that fact — useful scaffolding, but not a substitute for a child who recognises the shape of what is happening and has already decided what to do.