Students Launch Senior Scam Awareness Initiative
- San Ramon students initiated Project Cybershield to educate seniors on scams. - They held workshops and spoke at the FBLA conference recently. - The program aims to protect vulnerable community members through community outreach, per patch.com
Students in San Ramon have started Project Cybershield, a local effort to teach older adults how to spot phone, email, and internet scams. (patch.com) The student team has run scam-awareness workshops and community outreach events, and it recently presented the project at a Future Business Leaders of America conference. Future Business Leaders of America says it serves more than 200,000 middle school, high school, and college students each year. (patch.com) (fbla.org) The push comes as scam losses among older adults keep rising. The Federal Trade Commission said in December 2025 that reported fraud losses for people 60 and older climbed from about $600 million in 2020 to $2.4 billion in 2024. (ftc.gov) Older adults are also widely exposed to fraud attempts even when they do not lose money. A University of Michigan poll published in November 2023 found that three out of four adults ages 50 to 80 had faced a scam attempt in the prior two years, and three in 10 said they had been victimized at least once. (ihpi.umich.edu) An earlier Patch report from April 14, 2025 described a similar East Bay training effort led by San Ramon student Adya Gupta through her nonprofit Impactt Kids. That program taught seniors how to recognize scam calls, phishing emails, fake Internal Revenue Service and Medicare claims, and lottery scams. (patch.com) Impactt Kids said it later hosted three fraud-prevention workshops for seniors, including one at The Watermark retirement community in San Ramon and two at the Emerald Valley Senior Center in Dublin. The group said the sessions focused on helping seniors feel more confident using technology. (impacttkids.org) California Future Business Leaders of America describes state projects as student-created business and leadership programs, which gives student teams a ready-made venue to present community campaigns like scam education. (californiafbla.org) Project Cybershield’s pitch is simple: teach people before the scam reaches them. In San Ramon, that means students turning conference talks and local workshops into a neighborhood fraud-prevention campaign. (patch.com)
