Overview

During breaks, you volunteer at the senior center in the town where you grew up, teaching older people the basics of using e-mail and the web. You started this work in high school at the advice of a guidance counselor who said the experience would look good on a college application, but you found you liked it so much you’ve continued the work even though you’re now a college student. During a recent break, you’re talking to Doris, an 83-year-old you taught to use e-mail last year, when she tells you about the e-mail she received this morning (see the Background Text section). She’s very concerned by the e-mail, which warns her that someone has tried to access the PayPal account she uses to make online purchases. She was going to click a link in the e-mail to change her password, but she can’t remember where she wrote it down — she’s hoping you’ll remember where she put it since you helped her set up the account a few months ago. As she explains the e-mail, you sense something’s not right.

The e-mail certainly looks like an official message from PayPal. But that’s the problem: It’s not all that complicated to copy PayPal’s logo and write a message that looks official. More to the point, you know financial sites are often the subject of “phishing” scams that trick users into disclosing personal information or passwords. They often contain disguised links that take users to fake sites that look just like official sites — but when users enter their user IDs and passwords, these security details are harvested by the phishing site so that hackers can break into the users’ real accounts. You decide to investigate a little and so hover over the link in the e-mail — ha! The tooltip that pops up shows you the actual URL of the link, and it’s clearly not PayPal.

Explaining all of this to Doris takes a while, but in the end you think she understands what’s going on. You spend some time going over tips for safe surfing. She’s a little shaken, but it looks like everything will be fine.

After dinner, Doris asks whether you could do something to help prevent other people from falling prey to e-mail scams like this: a brochure or an article for the senior citizens’ newsletter published in her town, or perhaps a presentation or poster to put up at the community center where she and her friends meet for lunch. You agree to work something up.