Spot the scam: a phishing game in ten everyday messages

Every phone gets the same ten messages, written for the lesson and realistic in every detail: a text about a parcel's unpaid fee, a bank's text and an email in its name, two notes from a school's IT desk, a job offer, a reply to a listing, a verification code, a voicemail from an officer and a subscription's renewal. Every brand, sender, address and link is fictional and printed as plain text that nobody can tap, and every phone number is in the reserved 555-01 range.

Each student works through the ten on their own phone, at their own pace, the same ten messages twice, and can change any answer until the step closes. While they work, the projector shows only who each message is from and how many have answered it, never a word of a message and never what anyone answered. Then the screen stamps the truth on the room's calls, message by message, and ranks the messages the most of us got wrong, where a genuine message called a scam counts as wrong too.

Next, every person's answers on the six scams are counted card by card: what each did with a message the first time through, set against what they said of it the second, in one grid with a headline whose words the room's own counts decide. Where a scam got past the room, it is then drawn large, and a pen inks its tells, such as a lookalike address, a deadline or a link to the wrong domain, beside what the room says it checks first.

Counts only: the projector never names or places a person, and each phone sees only its own ten, checked against the truth at the end. Scams are made to work on careful people, so the lesson ends on a habit, not a score. Try the screen-and-phone preview: the phone is yours, and fictional classmates answer through the same runtime as the lesson.