Interview with Ask Silver: ‘Scams affect millennials more than older generation’

Written By:

Matt Browning

Posted:

13/12/2024

Updated:

13/12/2024

Friends Alex Somervell and Jonny Pryn set up an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered scam checker in May 2024 after Alex’s close relative lost £150,000 to criminals through cryptocurrency scams.

Since July 2024, thousands of users have benefitted from checking whether they’ve been sent a scam, and major banks have tapped into the ground-breaking technology too.

But how does Ask Silver work, and will it turn the tide of the ongoing scam epidemic?

If you are among the two-thirds of the UK population who receive a scam attempt at least once per month, you can send a screenshot to or take a photo of the correspondence to be checked over by Ask Silver.

This can be anything from a text that claims to be a legitimate delivery company to a message from an unrecognised number supposedly from a relative or even a suspicious leaflet.

You then use Ask Silver’s online form to leave your name, email and mobile number and you’ll receive an email with a QR code that leads you to the WhatsApp chat. Indeed, the product is the first of its kind in the UK to utilise the messaging service.

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How it works

The product’s name derives from the growing trend of the ‘silver’ generation asking younger relatives for help on whether something is a scam or not.

However, from personal experience, Somervell knows the issues of scams are by no means exclusive to the older generation.

He exclusively told YourMoney.com: “It’s just such a problem in society and isn’t something that just affects older people at all; in my ignorance, I thought that was the case in the early days.

“Actually, scams affect the millennial generation more than older people, statistically. And I’ve got three friends who are all in their early 30s and their late 20s who’ve all been scammed in the last nine months.

“One lost £40,000, one lost £70,000 and one lost £165,000, and they’re all young, smart guys who were just tricked in some really, really sophisticated social engineering.

“And if it could happen to them, it could happen to me and it could happen to you, and if it could happen to you, it could happen to your parents.”

Society’s double-edged sword

The entrepreneur said the society we’re living in now is a double-edged sword when it comes to the battle against scammers “because it’s so easy to transact, send money, pay for stuff – which is awesome – it also just means that you could lose your life savings in minutes”.

“And that is one of the reasons why the regulators intervened and said: ‘No, someone has to foot this bill, we can’t have our citizens losing so much money and have their lives ruined’.”

Advancements in technology might have made it easier for criminals to con people into sending money to them, but it’s thanks to developments in AI that a scam can be automatically detected with Ask Silver and the results speedily delivered.

The AI-generated content is constantly monitored by Alex’s friend and co-founder Jonny Pryn, and within the communication you have on WhatsApp, there is the reminder that: ‘Ask Silver is a free tool to be used alongside your own research and best judgement’.

The industry award-winning product remains under “constant review” too, so the latest scams are included on its radar.

And Somervell doesn’t plan on the scam checker’s impact to be confined to WhatsApp.

Since the product launch in May, the start-up has looked to help as many people as possible by working with several major UK banks that are trialling the product.

“We had inbound from a number of big four banks actually saying: ‘This tool is really helpful for us’. And I think that’s ultimately where I think the business model is, long term… We’ve got this scam checker [that] is free for the consumer, and I think we want to build tools free for the consumer as much as possible.

“But we’re building tools to basically help banks protect their customers more in light of the authorised push payment (APP) fraud reimbursements and so on. And I just think it just makes a lot more sense for the bank, where they know that X% of their customers will be scammed yearly, that’s just a fact for them.”

He added: “We’re coming into the Christmas season, there’s going to be purchase scams everywhere. And actually, purchase scams are one of the key things that banks are looking to partner with us with, because… there’s such high volume.

"We're coming into the Christmas season, there's going to be purchase scams everywhere. And actually, purchase scams are one of the key things that banks are looking to partner with us with, because... there's such high volume."

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“There’s thousands of these scams going through every single day with a lot of these big banks, and it’s just really, really difficult for them to intervene in each one. And so we’re basically offering them, in a scalable way, to reach out to all those individual customers, upload what they’re trying to pay for, and then run the checks and stuff for [them].”

Meanwhile, in 2024 the Financial Ombudsman Service received a record-high amount of complaints for a three-month period and fraudsters stole £11.4bn from scam victims. That’s a surge of £4bn in a year, according to the State of Scams in the UK 2024 report by Cifas and the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA).

Somervell – who has previously set up a children’s book company worth £2.5m after rejecting investment on Dragons’ Den – thinks there “needs to be some nuance” in what the figure could actually be.

This is because figures from UK Finance show around 200,000 incidents of fraud take place per year, with APPs representing the most common type of scam.

Reluctance to report

Whereas, the National Crime Agency (NCA), which just factors in England and Wales, estimates there are around three-and-a-half million incidents of fraud per year. The Citizens Advice Bureau found this could be around four million.

He said: “If you think about it, and you extrapolate that over to the National Crime, and you say, ‘we think that most of the fraud is going to be [APP]’ [where victims are tricked into sending money to criminals impersonating someone else], then actually that number could be 10 times higher.”

His prediction is supported by a report from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which found that only 13% of frauds against individuals were reported to Action Fraud.

The shame or embarrassment unfairly felt after being scammed and the effort it can take to report the crime are also contributing to the lack of justice for people, according to the 32-year-old.

"[New regulation] is not looking enough at the social media companies."

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One example cited by Somervell was with sellers using social media marketplaces to send faulty goods – which happened to his girlfriend – or items that do not arrive.

Somervell said: “A product not arriving doesn’t count as a civil dispute. That does count as a scam, but if you get anything at all, then that’s a civil dispute, and then the bank basically doesn’t really get involved. And it becomes a faff [to claim back money].

“The challenge for consumers and the effort that it takes to get, say, £40 back just makes those scams really hard to clamp down on.”

On the new rules from Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) that mean banks have to refund victims of APP fraud up to £85,000, the Ask Silver founder thinks it is “a move in the right direction.”

However, the regulation missed a huge section of the industry involved in scams – social media giants.

He said: “It’s placing the blame solely on the banks, and I think that is unfair; it’s not looking enough at the social media companies, the telecommunication companies [telcos], all of these organisations, which is where the scams originate from.

“Ultimately, they need to have some element of the responsibility and the liability, because if you get a text message scam… and you end up paying it, then maybe the bank should have had more checks in place, but those messages shouldn’t be coming through, and it’s a job of the ‘telco’ to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

“My view is there should be much more of a shared liability there, where, yes, the banks do pick up some of the tab.”

He added: “In my view, there has to be a lot more pressure done or put on the social media giants, the ‘telcos’, to do more now.”

And what does the relative who was scammed out of their life savings make of his scam-checking journey?

“They’re really proud and happy that from such a horrible thing at least something good can come. But I don’t think we’ve done much yet – the work starts now.

“Some good things are happening, but I think there is a lot of work to do. So yeah, I think it’s time to crack on,” he added.