Operation Arlene is a learning project for non-technical adults, and the family members helping them, who want to feel less outmatched by scams and the internet in general. It’s named for my grandmother, Arlene.
Who Arlene was
Arlene was my grandmother. She lived long enough that the internet went from something she’d heard about on the news to something that knew her credit card number, her phone number, her email address, and the names of her grandchildren. The scams aimed at her changed every couple of months. Fake calls from “her bank.” Fake delivery texts. A man claiming to be one of her grandchildren in trouble.
She had us. She and I would talk through whatever the new thing was, and most of the time she spotted it on her own. She never lost money. We were lucky.
Most of what we figured out together, I never wrote down. After she passed, I kept thinking about that. The conversations we had weren’t unusual. Every family has them. And nobody is writing them down. Every household reinvents the same lessons from scratch.
Operation Arlene is me writing them down.
Why this, and why now
Two things changed recently and both of them make this harder for people like Arlene.
The first is that AI made it cheaper and faster to write a convincing scam. The phishing emails my grandmother saw in 2015 were obvious. The ones being sent today are clean, grammatical, well-targeted, and sometimes voiced by a cloned recording of someone you know. The bar to spot a fake is moving up.
The second is that the internet got worse at telling you what’s real. Search results are full of recently-spun-up blogs, AI-generated summaries, and pages built to rank, not to help. When someone wants to know “is this email a scam?”, they used to be able to ask the internet and get a decent answer. Today it’s a coin flip.
Institutions like the FTC and AARP cover this ground. They’re useful. They’re also slow, formal, and written by committee. There’s room for a named, current, plain-spoken alternative, and that’s what we’re trying to be.
What we’re building
We’re starting small and getting bigger as we go. The first surfaces are:
- A free monthly email with the scams hitting people right now.
- Short, plain-English lessons on the most common scams. Each one stands alone and answers a single question.
- A searchable library of real scams. Each entry is named, dated, and signed.
- A structured course called Everyday Internet Safety. It covers email, text, phone calls, passwords, two-factor authentication, and what to do if you got tricked. You can take it yourself or send it to someone you care about.
- A 2-minute self-check that asks what you do online and points you at the lessons that matter most for you.
- A version of the self-check from the helper’s point of view, for the adult child, niece, nephew, or friend who’s worried about someone and wants to help.
The free pieces stay free. The course is paid.
Who’s building it
I am. Michael Pilsner. Michael Pilsner, who got tired of watching good, careful people get tricked online and wrote down what he’d learned helping his grandmother Arlene avoid it..
I’m signing everything on this site. If anything here is wrong, I want to hear about it.
Where to start today
The thing built and ready today is the monthly email. Sign up below to get it. Lessons and the rest of the catalog will follow.
If you got here from a personal note I sent you, thank you for reading it.