How to deal with calls from scammers

A case study describing how Alec and Peka, his AI assistant, turned one YouTube video into a notice to pin beside the phone, and who did what along the way.

The starting point

Frank Delaney, a former fraud investigator, runs a YouTube channel called Safety Senior. Alec chanced upon one of his videos, "Why Scammers Stay Silent for 3 Seconds When You Pick Up". It answered a question he had been discussing with family, and it gave five rules for answering a call from a number you do not know. Alec wanted those rules in a form an older person could use: short, plain and pinned beside the phone. He also thought it worth capturing all of Delaney's videos on this and related subjects, because they deal with a serious and growing problem.

Everything that follows happened on the morning of 5 September 2026 and took less than an hour of Alec's time.

Getting hold of the material

A browser extension called Kortex loaded every video on the channel, 37 of them, into a Gemini Notebook in one operation. He asked the notebook for the five rules, and it drew them out of the one video along with Delaney's explanations. He pasted that text into a note in ThinkSpace, where he does all his work. (For future reference, he could simply have asked Peka to extract the files from the notebook.)

Writing the short form

Alec asked Peka to tidy the note and to write the five rules in a shorter form, suitable for a reader who is not technical. Peka rewrote each rule as one bold instruction and one reason, kept Delaney's full explanations underneath, and asked Alec for two editorial decisions: what to call the note and where it belonged.

Making the notice

Alec then asked for something he could print and pin up. Peka designed a single A4 page in black and red on white, with the type chosen for readers with poor eyesight and the two "hang up the phone" moments highlighted. The page was in the form of a PDF, which Alec printed and shared with family.

Putting it where it is useful

Alec wanted to publish the notice and make further use of it, so Peka filed it in the Anapoly website. Once it was live, Peka added it as a new source in the Safety Senior notebook, so the finished notice now sits beside the video it came from.

The notice is at https://www.anapoly.co.uk/files/five-rules-for-answering-an-unknown-call.pdf, and the rules are in Five rules for answering an unknown call, in the short form and in full. Two further extracts from the same notebook, The dangers of the yes trap phone scam and The power of the counter-question, explain the rule about the word "yes" and what to say instead.

Who did what

Alec	Peka
Chose the channel, the video and the rules	Fetched the channel's details and the notebook's contents
Set the audience and the purpose	Tidied the note and wrote the short form
Named the note and chose its category	Designed and rendered the notice
Judged the notice against its purpose	Filed the notice on the website and in the notebook
Signed in where a person was needed	Reported each step, including its own faults

This division of responsibility is now becoming standard practise for ThinkSpace. Alec sets the direction and edits the words; Peka does the mechanics and the technical housekeeping.

What to take from it

This is a kind of work which happens quite often. When carried out by a human alone, it is tedious and can be time-consuming. When carried out with the assistance of Peka, it is almost effortless and takes very little of the human's time.