Digital Safety Clinics.
A free 45-minute session that a care home, library, community group or older people’s organisation can run for the people it serves. Everyone uses UtilForge tools on a phone or computer, and nothing anyone types is uploaded.
If you doubt it, UtilForge it. Then phone someone you already know.
The 45-minute session
- Five minutes: one true story. UtilForge began when the founder’s mother and father, who were learning to use the internet, found payments they had never agreed to leaving their bank account after using friendly-looking platforms, games and quizzes. Read the story, or share one from your own community.
- Ten minutes: three moments to check. Before you pay. Before you tap a link. Before you send a document or a code.
- Twenty minutes: everyone runs one check. On their own phone or on one of your devices. Before You Pay and Family Safe Word are good first choices.
- Ten minutes: the card and the person to ask. Hand out a printed card and write in the name of someone each person can ask.
What your organisation gets, free
- Family Safety Tools: fifteen tools and a one-page family guide, pay what you want, including nothing.
- Cards to print: the Check first poster, the Check first card and the family safe word card.
- The free Check first field guide, a 28-page PDF (Portable Document Format) file to print or hand out, with a quick response code for each tool.
- This page as the session plan, and the guide I clicked a link in a text for questions afterwards.
- Help preparing: write to support@utilforge.org.
Ground rules for educators
- Helpers show each check on a prepared device. Each person then runs the check themselves.
- Helpers do not take control of anyone’s phone or computer, and do not take copies of bank statements, identity documents or passwords.
- Helpers follow your organisation’s own safeguarding rules, including any background check it requires for the role.
- UtilForge works alongside a bank’s fraud team, the police and security software. If money has already gone, call the bank on the number on the card, then use official help, country by country.
What UtilForge asks, only if you want to
- Permission to say that you hosted a session.
- One sentence about it on your website or in a newsletter, in your own words.
- A short conversation after thirty days: what confused people, and what UtilForge should change.
If you mention UtilForge, please add this line: Tools supplied free by UtilForge. We were not paid to recommend them. The checks run on each device and nothing is uploaded.