How my mum got scammed out of £340.
The text said a parcel was held for a £2 redelivery fee. The site looked like the Royal Mail's. She entered her card number. Within eighteen hours, £340 was gone.
This is the scam that made me start Pagevet.
In March 2024, my mum got a text message that looked like it came from Royal Mail. It said a parcel couldn't be delivered because £2.19 was owed in import fees. The link took her to a page that looked exactly like the Royal Mail website: the right logo, the right typefaces, the right red-and-yellow branding. She paid the £2.19. Then she forgot about it.
Over the next eighteen hours, £340 left her account in three transactions. A £97 card transaction at a petrol station in Manchester. A £140 one at a shop in London. A £103 one that got flagged and reversed before it completed. She lives in rural Yorkshire and hadn't been to either city in six years.
When she rang me in a panic the next morning, I did the thing I'd done two hundred times for customers of the bank I worked at. I logged into her online banking, saw the pattern, recognised it, rang the bank's fraud line, and got it reversed over four days.
Why she didn't spot it
Here's the awkward part. I knew that scam was circulating. I'd warned her about it. I'd shown her three examples. She'd told me she understood.
She still clicked.
The reason is that recognising a scam in the moment is a completely different cognitive task from recognising one when someone is explaining it to you. When you're explaining, the context is 'here is a scam'. When you're receiving a text, the context is 'oh, a parcel'. The signal she needed was external to her, arriving from something that already knew what the page was.
The three seconds that would have stopped it
When my mum clicked the link in the text, her browser started loading a page that was registered to a domain that was seventeen days old, hosted on the same Ukrainian IP as 214 other fake-delivery sites, and displayed an SSL certificate issued to a holding company with no operational history. If she had any sort of tool that checked these signals as the page was loading, it could have stopped her before the form even rendered.
That tool didn't exist for consumers. Enterprise tools exist. Enterprise SSE products exist. They cost thousands of pounds a year and require a procurement process to install. For a retired 71-year-old in rural Yorkshire, the useful version of that product didn't exist.
So I built it. That's what Pagevet is.
What we do differently
Pagevet doesn't ask you to recognise a scam. It recognises one before you see it. When my mum's browser loads a page that matches the signals of a fake-delivery scam (the fresh domain, the known scam-hosting IP, the lookalike branding, the pattern of a dozen quiet indicators), Pagevet stops the page from rendering and shows a plain warning: 'This looks like a scam. The real Royal Mail site is at royalmail.com.' That's it.
She clicks through to the real site if she needs to. She gives up if she doesn't. Either way, she doesn't enter her card details into a stranger's form.
Mum has had Pagevet installed for two years now. It has shown her a warning four times in that period. Each one was a fake delivery scam. Each one, she went back and told me about it. She's proud of spotting them, which she shouldn't be, the tool did it, but I let her enjoy it.
If there's someone in your life who might click the wrong link, Pagevet exists for them. Install it on their device once. It does the rest.