Growing up as a pianist, I’ve spent a lot of my life performing for people much older than me.
Some of my warmest memories didn't take place onstage; they came afterward, from talking with older audience members who stayed to tell me about a piece they loved, to ask when I would play again, or simply to encourage me to keep going. Some of these people have known me since I was a little kid. In many ways, I grew up surrounded by older adults who were incredibly generous with their encouragement.
So when scams started becoming more sophisticated, especially with AI, the issue felt personal.
When it became personal
My grand-uncle was targeted and unfortunately lost all of his retirement savings. One longtime mentor who had watched me grow up was also deceived from a convincing email. These weren’t people who were careless or unintelligent. They were simply facing scams designed to exploit trust, urgency, and fear—and, increasingly, technology that can make something fake look or sound incredibly real.
That made me really angry.
What bothered me even more was learning about how many senior fraud cases never made it to the statistics. Many felt embarrassed or didn't know how to report it, leading them to stay quiet as a result. The numbers we see are already enormous—and they only represent a portion of the true scale of this issue.
At the same time, cybersecurity has become one of the things I cared about most. I had spent years learning about it through competitions, projects, the FBI National Academy Associates Youth Leadership Program, MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute’s Embedded Security program, and certifications including CompTIA Security+ and the Google Cybersecurity Certificate.
I loved the technical side of cybersecurity: finding vulnerabilities, understanding how attacks work, and figuring out how to build better defenses.
But I started wondering what all of that knowledge was worth if I couldn’t use it to help the people I cared about.
“Could I take what I had learned about cybersecurity and build something that made an older person just a little harder to scam?”
That led me to create GoldenGuard.
I started working on the idea in early 2026 through the Champaign Public Library’s Young Entrepreneur Program. What began as an idea became a working project, and GoldenGuard eventually received a $2,000 seed grant from the program.
That funding is now helping us offer 1,000 free accounts to older adults as we begin putting GoldenGuard into the hands of real people, learning from them, and continuing to improve it.
I know GoldenGuard won’t stop every scam. No tool can. But if something I build can make one person pause a little longer before clicking a link, look at a suspicious message more carefully, or call someone they trust before sending money, then the cybersecurity skills I’ve spent years learning are doing something much more meaningful to me:
They’re helping me protect the people who spent so many years believing in me.
See what that idea became.
Explore the public beta, test a suspicious message, and help us keep improving GoldenGuard for the people it was built to protect.