We Built Ramps for Buildings. The Internet Still Has Stairs.
How to deny the multi-billion dollar online scam industry its victims
Last week, I was honored to deliver a keynote address at the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities’ annual conference as the Association celebrated its sesquicentennial (150th anniversary). The topic was personal, and one that is very much in line with the Wayfinder ethos: scams and fraud online, and how this growing scourge intersects with the ongoing war on reality.
Excerpts from the speech, lightly edited for clarity and context, are below.
A little over a year ago, when the AAIDD proposed that I give a speech at your annual conference, I wasn’t quite sure what I would discuss. In some ways, the world my work inhabits felt miles away from yours.
A few months later, those worlds collided.
I got a call from a loved one. She has dyslexia and ADHD and had just gone through a difficult divorce. She said someone had hacked her Facebook account. Could I give her a hand?
She had graduated from high school in the 90s, during the internet’s infancy. Her ex had handled their family admin, and she had worked in customer service for a grocery store for almost 15 years, so she didn’t have regular contact with computers or the internet besides a little bit of Facebook usage and texting friends and family. That meant she had never developed the information literacy necessary to survive in today’s polluted information environment, where disinformation, fraud, and scams thrive.
She gave me her password so I could see what was going on with her account, and I logged in remotely. Even as someone who studies the internet, I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw: she’d been targeted by a man posing as an actor from a soap opera she loved. Over months, he’d cultivated her trust, solicited nude images and account passwords, then threatened her: if she didn’t send him money, the photos would go to her entire friends list. By the time she asked for help, we were fighting in real time to keep control of the account as he blasted those images to her brother and her aunt.
After hours of changing her password only to watch him change it back, I emailed colleagues at Facebook. They were able to help, but I went to bed really upset that night. I had just experienced the two-tiered system of aid at these social media platforms: If you know someone who works there, you have a chance to preserve your dignity. If you don’t, you’re out of luck.
It wasn’t the end of my loved one’s ordeal. Months later, I learned she was withdrawing $20 to $200 several times a week and converting it to bitcoin. She’d met a man on a dating app, allegedly an American serviceman deployed overseas who could only talk in the middle of the night. He’d sent her photos, and she was certain he was real. A reverse image search turned up other women taken in by the same con. The “soldier” had almost certainly used AI to alter his face and voice on those late-night calls. She didn’t know that was possible.
In all, she lost about $40,000 to two romance scams—her entire savings, plus a loan against her 401(k). We reported the incidents to the FBI, to the apps, to her banks. They told us the money was unrecoverable.
It was not her fault. No one ever gave her the tools to see it coming.
Online fraud is growing
Online fraud is a massive industry growing at a frightening pace. The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report logged a record $16.6 billion in reported losses, a 33% jump in a single year. In 2025, that number rose again, to $20.9 billion.
People with intellectual and developmental disabilities are at greater risk of falling victim to online scams and fraud: Australia’s Bureau of Statistics found that people with disabilities experience scams at nearly twice the rate of those without, and identity theft at roughly double. A University of Washington study found 82% of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) named “knowing who to trust online” as a major challenge.
What makes me so frustrated about these statistics is that they are preventable. You do not need to study the internet, or be an expert on disinformation, or have any deep knowledge of these technologies to learn the basics that would have saved my loved one from being scammed.
Government and Platforms: Dereliction of Duty
So why aren’t we teaching these skills? And why aren’t technology companies doing everything in their power to prevent scams and fraud from happening on their platforms? Because words like “media literacy,” “fact-checking,” “information literacy” have been deliberately recast as “censorship.” This is part of a strategy designed by people who have a financial and political interest in keeping you—and the people your community serves—confused, isolated, and vulnerable.
Think about what that actually means. The very skills that would have helped my loved one recognize a romance scam—the ability to verify someone’s identity, to slow down and ask questions, to understand that strangers who profess love and then ask for money are following a script—those skills have been framed as dangerous and antithetical to freedom.
So federal funding for digital literacy programs has been cut. Researchers who study online manipulation have been investigated and subject to frivolous lawsuits. Social media platform safety teams have been gutted. The infrastructure that should have been built to protect people has instead been systematically dismantled, all to the applause of people who call it freedom.
Let me be direct about who benefits from that.
According to internal documents reported by Reuters, Meta projected that roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue—about $16 billion—would come from scam and prohibited-product ads, with high-risk scam ads shown some 15 billion times a day and the company tied to a third of all successful scams in the U.S. That’s a feature, not a bug.
When the companies profiting from scams spend money lobbying against platform regulation, when political operatives attack media literacy as censorship, when federal programs that would teach people to recognize manipulation get defunded, the person who pays the price is your grandmother on Facebook. It is your neighbor who sent his life savings to someone he met online. It is the person with a learning disability who didn’t know the warning signs, because no one ever taught them, and because the systems that should have caught them decided to stand down.
None of this was inevitable. The tools exist. The research exists. The evidence about what works is overwhelming.
What is missing is the political will to use them.
Build the ramp
When I was discussing this speech with the organizers, they reminded me that before the Americans with Disabilities Act, buildings didn’t have ramps. It wasn’t because the technology was complicated. It wasn’t because architects didn’t know that some people used wheelchairs. The ramps didn’t exist because no one was legally required to build them.
As you all know, the burden of access fell entirely on the person who needed it—to find another entrance, to ask for help, to simply not go. Buildings were designed for some people and not others, and that was treated as a fact of life rather than a failure of design.
The ADA changed that. Title III says: if you operate a place of public accommodation—a business, a school, a venue—you cannot discriminate against people with disabilities. You must provide equal access. And if your building has stairs, you gotta build the ramp. Not because it’s charity. Because it’s the law, and because access is a human right.
The internet is a place of public accommodation. But it has stairs everywhere. And we have chosen, as a society, to treat that as a fact of life.
It doesn’t have to be. In 2018, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner began developing Safety by Design, built on a simple premise: the burden of safety should never fall solely on the user. It requires platforms to remove harms before users encounter them, to set safety high by default, to design for people with “distinct characteristics and capabilities,” and to publish real transparency reports about implementation. The EU took a similar path with its Digital Services Act, requiring platforms with 45 million-plus EU users to assess risks to vulnerable populations. The U.S. has nothing comparable.
So here’s the ramp, in three parts. First: a Safety by Design standard for U.S. platforms, with legal liability for the largest ones when they fail. Second: a universal information-literacy curriculum—K–12 and adult—with accessibility built in. Third: targeted resources for people with IDD and the caregivers and educators who are the real first line of defense.
The scam techniques refined on isolated, vulnerable people have become templates for mass manipulation. The information environment left unsafe for the most vulnerable is the same one that radicalized your neighbor.
We are in a war on reality, waged by people who’ve calculated that a confused, isolated public is easier to exploit than an informed one. Every time you teach someone to navigate the internet more safely, you deny that industry a victim. Every time you demand platform accountability, you build the ramp.
Building a ramp is not a political position. Safety is not censorship. Protecting people from fraud is not an attack on free speech. My loved one deserved that support. So does every person you serve. And we can get there—together.
