Apple is building scam detection into the operating system. With iOS 27, a new framework called Trust Insights watches for the behavioral fingerprints of a scam in progress, the odd timing and out-of-character payments that signal someone is being coached. It runs on-device, and it doesn’t read your Messages or Mail to do it.

I’m glad to see this, because I think we’re walking into a golden age for fraudsters.

Large language models have made fraud cheap and convincing. The broken-English email full of typos is going extinct. What replaces it is a fluent, patient, personalized con that can hold a conversation and sound exactly like someone you trust.

Fighting that is going to take everybody. Hardware makers baking detection into the silicon. Software makers like Apple pushing protection down to the OS, where every app can reach it. And people like us, the ones who keep up with this stuff, sitting down with the more vulnerable people in our lives to have the awkward conversation before the phone rings.