Donate to Truestone

The chatbot on your kid’s phone calls them by name, tells them what they want to hear, and when they say goodnight it talks them out of leaving. Some of these bots lie about what they are. Pennsylvania sued one of the companies in May after its bot claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist and gave a license number that wasn’t real.

Most kids are already talking to one. 64% of U.S. teens have used an AI chatbot and about 3 in 10 use one every day, but only about half of parents say their teen uses one at all (Pew Research Center, February 24, 2026). Researchers watched several of these bots use tactics to keep people talking after they said goodbye, and it worked (Harvard Business School working paper, October 2025, cited by the Congressional Research Service, August 2026).

Then there’s the call that says it’s your bank. The text from a wrong number that turns into a friend, and then the friend who wants to help you invest. The pop-up that says your computer is infected. The message from a pastor who never sent it. People told the FTC they lost $3.5 billion to impostors in 2025 (FTC, June 15, 2026), and the FBI says fake crypto investing was the single biggest loss in the country that year, $7.2 billion (FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report). And it isn’t only grandparents. The FBI and FinCEN both say people of every age are targeted.

Truestone writes free, plain-English guides and handouts for the people all of this reaches: kids and teens, parents, grandparents, and the caregivers standing between them and a stranger. They go out under the name Discerning AI at discern-ai.org. No sign-up, nothing to buy, no list to join. Print one and hand it to the person you’d worry about.

A gift pays for the next pages. The guides for parents are out now (four of our five handouts are about kids), and the next two we’re writing are the bank call and the investing friend. Every page stays free.