One page, black and white, made to be printed and left by the phone. It holds the one thing that stops a cloned-voice call: a safe word only your family knows, plus the checks to run when a call feels urgent.
Our family phone rule
Keep this by the phone. Anyone can be fooled by a familiar voice — AI can copy one from a few seconds of video.
Our safe word
Anyone who calls asking for money or urgent help must say it. Write it here by hand — never store it in a phone or email.
If a call feels urgent, do these three
Ask for the safe word. A real relative will not mind. A scammer cannot answer.
Ask something only they would know that is not on social media — never a birthday or a pet's name.
Hang up and call them back on the number you already have. Wait a few minutes first; a scammer can stay on the line.
No real bank or authority ever asks you to
Read out a code from a text message or an app
Install an app or let someone connect to your computer
Buy gift cards, or send cryptocurrency, to pay anything official
Move your money to a "safe account" — there is no such thing
Nobody honest will rush you. Slowing down costs you nothing and costs a scammer everything.
Numbers to call — fill these in
Our bank's fraud line
Family member to call
Emergency: 911 (US) · 999 (UK) · 112 (EU)
Get the card
The PDF is A5 — half a sheet of A4. Print it as-is, or use your printer's "2 pages per sheet" option to get two cards from one page.
Print it, photocopy it, hand it out, put it in a newsletter or on a noticeboard. You may adapt it too — add your own phone number, or translate it — as long as the card still says where it came from. Published under CC BY 4.0.
Why a piece of paper
The scam that works best on families is the one that removes thinking time. A voice you recognise says there has been an accident, or that your account is being emptied right now, and asks you to act before you can check. AI voice cloning made that voice easy to fake from a few seconds of audio, so the old advice — "you would know your own grandchild" — no longer holds.
What still works is a rule agreed in advance, written down where the phone is. Not in an app, not in an email, not something you have to remember while your heart is pounding. A card by the phone is read by the person taking the call, at the moment they are taking it — which is the only moment that matters.
How to use it
Agree on a safe word together, in person. Something none of you would ever post online: not a pet's name, not a birthday, not a street you have lived on. Two unrelated words work well.
Write it on the card by hand. We deliberately left that line blank — a safe word printed by a website is not a secret.
Fill in your bank's real fraud number, copied from the back of the card or the banking app, and one trusted family member to call. Never a number from a message.
Put one card by every phone in the house, and give a copy to the relatives most likely to be called. Agree out loud that nobody will be offended by being asked for the word.
For libraries, banks and community groups
This card was made to be handed out. If you run a library, a seniors' club, a community centre, a bank branch or a police prevention programme, you are welcome to print it in quantity and distribute it, in any of the ten languages it exists in. There is no licence to sign and no cost. If it is useful, linking to this page helps the people who need it find it themselves.