How to protect your parent from scams, without taking over

To protect a parent from scams, do three things together. Agree on one rule: nobody sends money or buys anything because of a call, a text or an ad without first ending that contact and checking with the other person. Spend a sitting or two on the six account and phone changes below, in order. Then practice, so that pausing is a habit before the real call comes.

Do all of it with your parent, never behind their back. Partly because that’s the decent way. Mostly because the person who will have to hang up on a convincing caller is your parent, and a rule they chose is one they’re far more likely to use. If a scam is already under way, start with what to do if your parent is being scammed instead.

The checklist at a glance

The first three make it harder for money to leave quietly. The last three make it harder for someone to open accounts in your parent’s name. Most families can do the first three in one sitting; the government logins may take a second.

1. Alerts on their bank and card accounts, to them and (with their OK) to you
2. A trusted contact on their bank and brokerage accounts
3. A quieter phone: carrier spam blocking, unknown callers to voicemail
4. Credit freezes at all three bureaus
5. A my Social Security account
6. An IRS identity protection PIN

Each step is explained below, with what it does and what to expect.

If you’re the parent reading this

Someone who loves you probably sent you this page. The people who run these scams are professionals, and they fool careful, intelligent people of every age, including people who study this for a living. What follows is a deal between two adults, and everything on this page is done together or not at all. (I’m the founder of ScamPrep, where we’re building realistic scam practice for older adults who opt in. More on that near the end. The rest of this page is advice, not a product.)

How to talk to your parent about scams

Make it mutual and make it recurring. One formal sit-down lands as a verdict. A few sentences every couple of weeks land as a shared project.

I’ve had this conversation with my own parents and with a lot of other people’s parents. Early on I got it wrong. I came in a little paternalistic, explaining scams as if the risk were theirs alone, and it landed exactly as you’d expect: they figured they were at least as resilient as I was and were never going to fall for any of it. Researchers have a name for that, optimism bias, and the April 2024 review by the federal advisory group on scams against older adults describes how the insulting stereotype of who falls for scams may feed it: if victims are “other people,” then it can’t happen to me.

So now I lead with the fact that I’m a target too. I work on this full time and I’ve still almost been taken on several occasions. I get texts that mention my siblings or my parents by name, and my first instinct is that anyone who knows those names must be a contact I haven’t saved or someone official calling about my family. When I dig a little deeper, it’s almost always a scam. The people sending them have the tools to send more, make each one more personal, and learn which versions work, and AI has sped all of that up. The worry isn’t only that my parents lose money. It’s that I do.

Then keep the conversation alive in small doses. I’ll mention a scam I heard about, or one a friend’s parent ran into, or say plainly that I’ve been worrying about this lately. Ten seconds at a time, every few weeks, does more than one serious talk.

Two more things help:

• Blame the scammer, never them. Shame keeps people quiet, and quiet is what the scammer counts on. A parent who knows they can tell you without a lecture will tell you.
• Let go of the old phone manners, together. Answering with your name. Staying on the line to be polite. Calling back a missed number. Those habits made people good neighbors, and scammers now rely on them. Letting an unknown call go to voicemail is not rude.

The one rule for any request for money

The rule has two halves, and it applies to both of you.

• End the contact, then check through a channel you already have. Hang up, or close the message. Then your parent calls you, or the number on the back of the bank card, or the agency’s number from its own website. Never the number that called, never the link in the text. You do the same when something lands on your phone.
• Treat urgency as the tell. A real emergency survives a ten-minute pause to check. In my family, a request that can’t wait ten minutes is the thing we check hardest.

Do you need a family code word?

A code word is one way to handle “it’s me, I’m in trouble” calls, and the FBI recommends a family password for exactly that. (Our guide to AI voice scams covers five ways to tell if a call from family is real.) My family doesn’t have one. I’ve told my dad and the rest of my family that if a voice that sounds like his calls me in a panic asking for money, I’m hanging up and calling him back on his own number, and I’d want details only he would know before I believed it. Pick whichever your family will actually use. Either way, a voice is not proof anymore, and the check happens after you’ve ended the first call, not during it.

The setup: six changes, in order

Do it in one sitting if you can, and attach it to something you’d both look forward to.

Dragging the setup out is more painful than getting it done, and in the meantime the easy doors stay open. Pick a time and commit to it. When I did ours, I scheduled a dinner out and did the setup in the half hour before we left the house, so the chore had a reward on the other side. A quarterly look at the budget or an afternoon of tax paperwork works the same way; you’re already in the mode.

The order below is a judgment call, and here’s the reasoning. Of the money people 60 and over reported losing to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2025, about $7.75 billion in all, the two largest categories by far were investment fraud and tech support: scams where the person is talked into paying. Credit opened in someone’s name is a far smaller category in the same report. So start with the steps that give a payment a chance to be noticed, then close the identity doors.

1. Turn on alerts for their bank and card accounts

Alerts give either of you a chance to say “that one looks off” before the next payment goes out. Turn on text or email alerts for large transactions and for anything unusual, sent to their phone, and with their OK, to yours. It’s a few minutes per account in the app or by phone.

2. Add a trusted contact to their accounts

A trusted contact is someone the firm may call if it sees signs of a scam or can’t reach your parent. The contact gets no access to the money and no authority over the account. Brokerages must make reasonable efforts to ask for one; for banks and credit unions, federal regulators listed it as a recommended practice in December 2024, so ask whether yours offers it. Of everything on this list, this is the one that is plainly not oversight. It’s good practice for anyone with an account, at any age.

3. Quiet the phone

Send unknown numbers to voicemail, and call back on a number you look up. Ask the phone company to turn on its free spam blocking. On an iPhone, turn on Silence Unknown Callers; on a Pixel, Call Screen. The FCC lists the options by carrier and phone. One tradeoff to say out loud: doctors’ offices and pharmacies often call from numbers you won’t recognize, so the habit is “check voicemail and call back,” not “block everything.” While you’re in the phone, turn on two-step sign-in for their email and banking apps.

Does the Do Not Call Registry stop scammers? No. It stops sales calls from legitimate companies; scammers ignore it. Register anyway for a quieter phone, but don’t count on it for protection.

4. Freeze their credit at all three bureaus

A credit freeze means nobody can open a new credit account in your parent’s name until they lift it. It’s free, it doesn’t affect their credit score, and they lift it temporarily when they apply for something. You do it separately with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. It doesn’t protect accounts that already exist, which is what steps 1 to 3 are for.

The next two steps involve government identity checks. Allow more time than you think, and don’t be discouraged by a second attempt.

5. Open a my Social Security account

Opening the account first means a scammer can’t open one in your parent’s name. Social Security says it “prevents identity thieves from fraudulently opening an account in your name”, and lists it first among its resources for protecting older adults from scams. Your parent creates the account themselves, in their own name. Sign-in runs through Login.gov or ID.me, which offer options for people without a smartphone, and if the online identity check won’t go through, your parent can make an appointment at a local Social Security office.

6. Get an IRS identity protection PIN

An IP PIN is a six-digit number that stops someone else from filing a tax return using your parent’s Social Security number. The quickest route is an IRS online account, which has its own identity check. If that won’t work, there’s a form for people under an income limit, and an in-person appointment for everyone else; those routes can take weeks, so this is the step most likely to spill past your sitting. The PIN changes every year, and their tax preparer needs it when the return is ready to file, so it’s a small yearly chore. One line to pass along: the IRS never asks for the PIN by phone, email or text, so anyone who does is a scammer.

Later, if you want

A Medicare.gov account, so they can read their claims and spot a service they never received. Their free credit reports at AnnualCreditReport.com. A shredder for the paperwork pile.

Why one conversation isn’t enough

“I can tell her over and over and next week she won’t remember.” That’s a top comment in one of the Reddit threads where adult children ask how to protect elderly parents from scams, and it’s a real worry. The research says it’s a worry about all of us.

The advisory group’s 2024 review found that the benefit of short warning messages lasted at least three months only when people got a reminder, and that six months out, people who’d received the information were no better at telling real investment pitches from fake ones than people who hadn’t. Attendees of an in-person security tutorial were no better at spotting phishing six months later than before they took it. Reminders, the review says, appear to act as a booster, and approaches that simulate being scammed are also promising. My own view, from years of these conversations: education doesn’t take when you’re just told. You have to put it into practice.

So instead of a bigger talk, build a small habit:

• When a scam lands in your own inbox or on your own phone, show it to your parent. Seeing how real they look, and how often you get them, does more than any warning.
• Every couple of weeks, ask: “Get any strange calls or texts lately?” Then look at them together, without tapping anything, and sort out which were scams.
• Run the rule once as a practice call. Say so up front: “Let me be the fraud department for a second.” You call about a problem with their account; they say out loud what they’d do, which is hang up and call the number on the back of the card. Nobody dials anything. It takes thirty seconds, and now it’s something they’ve done, not only something they’ve heard.

That habit is what we’re building ScamPrep to make routine. You invite your parent, they opt in themselves, and they get practice scams by email, text and phone on no set schedule, friendly coaching the moment one catches them, and a report every three months on how they’re doing. How it works. The kitchen-table version above costs nothing and is worth doing either way.

Where protection ends and taking over begins

There’s no single line, and every family is different. The principle I use is that it’s not a one-way street.

My parents are useful to me, too. When something odd lands in my inbox, they’re one of the people I check with. I tell them that, and it’s true, and it gives everyone the same standing: alerts, a trusted contact, a shared look at statements if they offer, all as things we do for each other rather than things I do to them.

What not to do, even though the internet suggests it

Skip anything your parent wouldn’t agree to if asked. Each of these turns up in advice online, and each tells your parent you don’t trust them:

• Routing your parent’s two-factor codes to your own phone
• Hiding their texting app and forwarding their messages to yourself
• Changing their phone number without asking

Power of attorney is a legal step planned in calm times with a lawyer, not a scam fix, and it belongs in a different conversation. If what’s really worrying you is your parent’s memory or judgment, AARP has a guide for families where cognitive decline is part of the picture, and their doctor is the right first call.

Keep going

If a scam is already under way, go to what to do if your parent is being scammed. For the scams a parent is likely to meet first, start with the one that arrives with open enrollment every autumn: Medicare scam calls.