About FamilyGuard

Why we built this

Years ago, my dad got a call from a woman who said she was my sister. She told him she'd been kidnapped and needed money urgently. My sister was abroad at the time and impossible to reach. For nearly two hours, my dad panicked, trying every way he could think of to confirm what was happening.

Eventually he reached me. Only once we'd spoken did he stop, realise something wasn't right, and refuse to send anything or respond to the caller again.

Two hours is a long time to be trapped in that kind of fear with no way to check. FamilyGuard didn't exist then. If it had, he wouldn't have needed to reach anyone at all, one question would have told him immediately, and the rest of the family would have known too.

More recently, my daughter came home from school asking, “What's our family safety word?” Her class had just covered scam awareness, and the school assumed every family already had one.

We didn't.

Scams like the one my dad faced aren't rare anymore. UK Finance's own reporting shows AI-generated fraud has become the country's fastest-growing risk, with cloned-voice attacks now considered the leading AI security threat. Industry experts increasingly warn that most people can no longer tell a real voice from a fake one. That's the gap between my dad's story and today: what happened to him by chance is becoming something any family could face by design.

That's why I built FamilyGuard.

Source: UK fraud losses rise as AI scams drive new warnings, SecurityBrief UK, June 2026

Where things stand today

FamilyGuard is a solo project, currently in pilot. No team, no funding, no company beyond me building this because my own family needed it and couldn't find it. If you're testing it with your family, you're one of the first people outside mine to use it.