Your course through the pond
Six stations, each about ten minutes. Start wherever you like — your progress is kept only in this browser.
Carp tip: The more a message rushes you, the more it pays to check calmly.
Why practising works
Doing beats reading
Studies of training against scam messages (“phishing”) point the same way: people who work through an exercise themselves do better than people who only read a warning.
Tricks, not typos
Spelling mistakes hardly give scammers away any more. So we practise recognising their levers: time pressure, fear, fake authority, a tempting reward.
Repetition keeps it fresh
What you practise once fades. The course suggests a short refresher after a day, a week and a month.
Carp learn it too
Anglers call it “hook-shy”: a carp that has once been caught bites more cautiously. In 2020, researchers showed that carp also become more careful simply by watching another carp being caught — at least for a while. The ones that had been hooked themselves remembered longer.
That is the idea behind this site: you don't have to fall for a scam to become careful. Watching and practising helps — and refreshing now and then keeps it working. (Lovén Wallerius et al., 2020)
Already clicked?
It happens to careful people too — scammers are professionals. What matters now is acting quickly and in the right order.
Practise together
The exercises work well side by side: with parents or grandparents at the kitchen table, or on a projector in a class. A special class mode shows everything larger and keeps no progress on the device.
All companies, people, addresses and numbers in the exercises are invented. Any resemblance to real companies or people would be purely coincidental and unintended.