Who’s Behind This?

Hi, I’m Jay. After I retired, I watched smart, capable people in my own community — friends, neighbors, people who’d run businesses and raised families — get rattled by a scam call or a phishing email that had no business fooling anyone. That’s when it clicked: scammers don’t win because people are foolish. They win because they’re relentless, and most people don’t have anyone in their corner.

This isn’t new territory for me. Years ago, while working at Time Warner, I worked directly with local law enforcement and the FBI to help track down scammers and bring real cases to real conclusions. I’ve seen how these operations actually work — and how they fall apart once someone stops playing along.

These days I volunteer six days a week with Senior Planet from AARP, helping older adults one-on-one with their phones, computers and email. I’ve done more than 200 of those sessions, and I serve on AARP’s fraud team. That means I hear about new scams the week they hit someone’s inbox, not months later.

So I started ScamStomper to be that someone. No jargon, no fear-mongering, no talking down to you — just straight answers on what’s real, what’s garbage, and how to shut it down.