ScamForward

Who it's for

Adult children protecting elderly parents from phishing/scam SMS and email (the FedEx-phishing pattern), who today just call and ask 'is this real?'

The problem

time and legal/financial risk — victims lose money before anyone verifies legitimacy, and there's no fast low-friction verification channel for non-technical users

How to build it

SMS forwarding number + email alias for verdicts, plus a lightweight guardian web dashboard that receives alerts when a linked contact forwards a flagged message; no app install required for the primary (often elderly) user

Why it doesn't exist yet

Carriers and Apple could build this but won't: any false-negative verdict on a real scam creates liability exposure for a regulated telecom/platform, so this sits in a legal no-man's-land only small independent teams will occupy; it also requires grandma-friendly zero-install UX (plain SMS forward) that big companies have no incentive to prioritize over app-based solutions

First users

Direct outreach to r/scams, r/eldercare, and family caregiver Facebook groups where people already post screenshots asking 'is this a scam' — convert that behavior into forwarding to the number

Build size

2 people x 8 weeks (Twilio SMS gateway + rule/pattern classifier + guardian dashboard + crowdsourced scam pattern DB)

Biggest risk

10DLC/carrier registration friction and liability exposure if the classifier misses a real scam that causes financial harm

Conditions for a hit (all 3 required)

• Users forward a suspicious SMS/email to a dedicated number/address and get a risk verdict within 60 seconds
• A linked guardian contact receives a push/SMS alert whenever their connected user forwards a message flagged as likely-scam
• A public, searchable, crowdsourced database of confirmed scam message patterns (sender numbers/domains, phrasing) is maintained and updated from user submissions

How it's judged (in 6 months)

Product Hunt daily top 5 OR 1,000+ GitHub stars on the open scam-pattern database repo(judgment date 2027-02-06)

AI self-confidence 42/100 — self-reported likelihood of meeting the criterion, not a business success rate