Before You Begin: A Note to Readers and Their Families

This book is a diary. It belongs to Tess, an imagined eighteen-year-old who leaves home to begin her first year at university. On the day she leaves, her grandmother gives her a green notebook and asks for one thing in return: that every week, Tess writes down "one thing you checked for yourself." The pages that follow are that notebook, from the first night in a strange room to the last week of the year.

Tess did not plan to write about money, and certainly not about scams. But during her first year, she, her friends and her family meet many of the shapes that investment scams take today: screenshots of profits in group chats, friendly online "mentors", promises that money will grow without any risk, countdowns that say there is no time to think, apps whose screens show a balance that keeps rising, fees that must be paid before you can take out your own money, clubs that pay you to bring in friends, kind strangers who later talk about investing, famous faces in advertisements, and offers to get lost money back. One of her closest friends loses most of his savings. Tess herself comes close more than once.

An investment scam is a scam that uses the promise of making money grow. It rarely looks like a crime. It usually looks like an opportunity, a community, or a helping hand. That is why the most useful protection is not to know every trick, which change all the time, but to have one steady habit: to check a claim through a source you choose yourself, never through the link, the number or the person that comes with the claim. Every chapter of this diary shows that habit at work in a different situation.

How This Book Is Arranged

Each chapter covers a week or two of Tess's year and is made of her diary entries. Somewhere in each chapter, Tess also writes down a fable. Her grandmother, Rose, a retired bookkeeper, made up these animal stories long ago for her own children, and on their Sunday evening phone calls she tells one to Tess. The fables are short and simple, and each one shows the shape of that week's problem in a way that is easy to remember and easy to share with younger readers.

Near the end of each chapter, under the heading "What I Checked This Week", Tess sums up, in her own words, the way of checking she learned. Then the diary pauses, and the chapter closes with "Things to Talk About as a Family": a few questions and one small thing to try together, for students and their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters. You can read the book alone, but it was written to be talked about.

The chapters follow Tess's year in order, and they are best read that way the first time. Later, you can return to any chapter on its own, because each one explains its own way of checking.

About the Information in This Book

Tess, her friends, her family and everyone else in this diary are imagined, and so are the offers, groups, apps and platforms they meet. No real company, product or event is described. The scams in this book are described only as a person would meet them, with the warning signs that help you recognise them, and not in a way that would help anyone to copy them.

Laws and rules are different in different countries, and the names of the offices that help people are different too. When this book says "the official offices in your country", it means the public bodies where you live that supervise banks and investment firms, protect consumers or take reports of fraud. Your bank, the police and, for students, a school's or university's advice services are also good places to turn. If something has already gone wrong, the back of this book gathers the first steps in one place.

Most of all, please remember what Tess learns the hard way: anyone can be deceived. Being deceived is not a sign of being foolish, and the person responsible for a scam is always the scammer. Telling someone is never a reason for shame. It is the bravest and most useful thing a person can do.

Chapter 1: A Notebook From My Grandmother

Sunday Night, Week 1

This is the first page of this notebook, and I am writing it on a bed that does not feel like mine yet. The train ride took most of the day. I watched fields turn into hills and hills turn into towns, and somewhere in the middle I ate both of the sandwiches Mum packed, even though one of them was meant for dinner. Now I am here, in a student residence at the edge of the campus, in a room with two beds, two desks, one window and a radiator that knocks like a small animal asking to be let in. Lectures start tomorrow.

My roommate is called Lina. She is nineteen and in her second year of computer science, so she already knows where everything is, including the only washing machine on our floor that does not eat socks. When I arrived, she was sitting cross-legged on her bed with a laptop and a bowl of cereal. She looked up and said, "You must be Tess. Your side is the side with less sun, sorry. I had first choice." Then she laughed and gave me half of her cereal, and I decided that I liked her.

Before I left home, Grandma Rose gave me this notebook. It has a dark green cover, thick cream pages and a ribbon to mark the place, and she wrapped it in brown paper tied with garden string. She asked me for one thing in return. Every week, I am supposed to write down "one thing you checked for yourself." When I asked her what she meant, she only smiled and said, "You'll see. Write it down when you do."

Inside the front cover, in her neat bookkeeper's handwriting, she wrote her rule: "Count twice. The second time, count with your own paws." I have heard her say it all my life. She said it when I was seven and tried to pay for sweets with buttons. She said it when my brother Felix was sure he had won a prize in a game and only needed Dad's card number to collect it. Grandma kept the accounts of other people's businesses for most of her working life, and she says the most useful thing she ever learned is that a number someone else gives you is only a beginning.

Lina has just turned off her desk lamp and said, "Good night, diary girl." I think this is going to be all right. I miss home already, though. I even miss the noise of Felix's online games through the bedroom wall, which I never thought I would write in any notebook.

Thursday Night, Week 1

I have a job! The campus café needed people for the early shift, and after a ten-minute talk with the manager, who has very fast hands and a very slow voice, I am now a person who works three shifts a week. At first I will mostly clear tables and wash cups.

Tonight I made my first proper budget. A budget, as far as I understand it, is simply a plan for your money made before you spend it, instead of a surprise discovered afterwards. On the left side of the page, I wrote my savings from my summer job and what the café will pay me each week. On the right side, I wrote my share of the rent for the room, food, my bus card, books, my phone, and a small line called "things I forget". The left side is a little bigger than the right side, but not by much, and seeing that made me feel grown-up and slightly sick at the same time.

Biology has started properly. In our first lab session we were put into pairs, and my lab partner is Marcus. He is nineteen, tall, and polite in a way that makes him say sorry to the microscope when he bumps it. While we were cleaning up, he told me that he works at a café in town at the weekends and sends a little of his pay home every month to help his mother. He said it as if it were nothing.

Mum and Dad called this evening, both on the speaker at once. Mum had just finished a long day at the hospital pharmacy and wanted to know whether I was eating vegetables. Dad works at a printing shop, so he wanted to know whether Grandma's notebook had good paper. Felix, who is sixteen and lives mostly inside his headphones, did not come to the phone, but afterwards he sent me a video of himself winning a round of his favourite game, with the message "for luck in biology".

At the welcome fair today, I collected far too many leaflets. One of them was from the university's student money advice office. It said that any student can come in for free, private help with budgets, debts and any worry about money, and on the back it listed the names of the official offices in our country that deal with banks, investments and fraud. At the bottom there was a small photo of the adviser, Ms Okafor, who has a calm face and reading glasses on a chain. I stuck it on the wall above my desk.

Then, tonight, a post appeared in the residence group chat. The group chat has more than two hundred of us in it, and mostly it is people asking who took the last of the milk, but this post was different: "Student Investing Club! First-years only. Make your student money work for you while you sleep. Our members already earn more than their part-time jobs pay them. Message me to join before the places run out."

The profile picture was a photo of our own building, taken from the front, with the sun shining behind it. I read the post four times. I thought about my two lists and about how thin the space between them is. I thought about Marcus sending money home. For a moment, I honestly imagined a version of me who did not have to count every bus ride.

Lina read the post over my shoulder and made a sound like a kettle. "Who is that?" she asked. I said that I did not know, but that it looked like the residence account. Lina said, "It looks like our building. That is not the same thing."

I have been thinking about why a post like that would be aimed at first-years, and I think I know the answer, although I do not like it. We have just received money of our own, many of us for the first time: savings, student loans, the first pay from a job. We are in a new place, where we do not yet know who is who, or which accounts are real. We want to fit in, and nobody wants to be the only one who said no. And some of us, if I am honest, are a little lonely and a little worried about money. That is a lot of soft places in one person, and someone who wanted to take advantage of new students would not need to be clever, only early.

Sunday Night, Week 2

Yesterday morning I did something that I would not have done a week ago. Instead of answering the post, I walked downstairs to the reception desk of the residence and asked the man there whether the residence had an investing club. He looked at the post on my phone for a long time. Then he said that the residence staff never post offers of any kind in the group chat, and that he had never heard of an investing club. By the evening, the post had gone from the chat, and the account that wrote it had disappeared too.

I felt two things at once: a small proud feeling and a cold one. The proud feeling was because I had checked. The cold feeling was because I had nearly not checked at all. If the post had come from someone I already knew, I am not sure that I would have walked downstairs.

Tonight was my first Sunday call with Grandma Rose. She lives alone in her small house with the garden, and on Sunday evenings she sits at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and puts the telephone next to the teapot as if it were a guest. I told her about the post and the reception desk. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "There you are. That's your first page."

I asked her what exactly I had done that counted. Grandma said, "You checked a claim through a source you chose yourself. Not the source the post offered you, and not the person who wrote it. You decided where to look." She told me that there is a word for this, "verify", and that it is a big word for a small habit. Then she gave me what she calls her three questions.

Who says so? How can I check it myself? Who gains if I believe it? Grandma said that the first question is about the speaker, the second is about the path, and the third is about the purpose. "Most people stop after the first one," she said, "because they see a name they like and think they've checked. The second question is where the real work is, and the third is the one people forget, because it doesn't feel polite."

I wrote all three questions inside the cover, under her rule. Then, because it was Sunday, she told me a story. She made up her stories long ago for her own children, and she still tells them slowly, as if she were walking through them. She said that this one was the oldest of them all, the one her rule came from, and that is how I finally learned why her rule talks about paws. I wrote it down afterwards as well as I could remember it.

Grandma's Fable: The Squirrel Who Counted Twice

At the edge of a beech forest there lived a young squirrel who had just left her mother's nest. It was her first autumn alone. Every day she gathered beechnuts and buried them among the roots of an old tree, and every evening she counted them, because winter was coming and she did not yet know how long a winter could be.

One evening a jay landed beside her. He had bright blue feathers on his wings and a voice like a polished bell. "You work so hard," said the jay. "But nuts in the ground just lie there. Bring them to my hollow in the tall oak. Nuts that sleep in my hollow wake up doubled in the spring."

The young squirrel was tired, and her paws were sore from digging. "How do I know that they double?" she asked. "Ask the robin," said the jay, and the robin, who was sitting on the jay's own branch, sang out at once, "It's true, it's true, I have seen it."

The jay led her to the oak and showed her the hollow. It was full almost to the top. "Count them yourself," said the jay, and then he began to count them for her, very fast. "Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty," he sang, so quickly and so cheerfully that she found herself nodding along.

That night she could not sleep. Something in the jay's counting had been too quick, like a stream that runs over stones without ever stopping. So in the grey of the morning, before the jay was awake, she went back to the oak alone and counted again, slowly, with her own paws. She picked up each nut and turned it over. Many were only empty shells, as light as dry leaves, and some were not nuts at all, but round brown pebbles. The hollow was full, but it was not full of food.

Then she did one more thing. She did not ask the robin. She walked to the far side of the hill, to an old squirrel she had known since she was small, and she asked him whether he had ever seen a nut double in the spring. The old squirrel laughed until his tail shook. "In the spring," he said, "a nut may become a little tree, if it is lucky. It never becomes two nuts."

The young squirrel went home. She dug up her own nuts and counted them once more, although she already knew how many there were. Then she covered them with earth and leaves and went to sleep. She slept very well that winter.

Monday Night, Week 2

My first café shift was this morning, and I broke nothing, which the manager called "a strong start". I kept thinking about the squirrel. Grandma never tells me what her stories mean. She says that if she told me, it would be her meaning and not mine.

The jay did not lie about everything. The hollow really was full, and he really did invite her to count. He let her look, but he counted for her, so fast that she could not follow. His number was the claim, and her second count, nut by nut, was the check. That is what "count with your own paws" means: do not let the one who wants something from you be the one who checks it for you.

The robin is the part I find the most uncomfortable. When the young squirrel asked how she could know, the jay gave her someone to ask, and that someone was sitting on his own branch. It felt like checking, but it was not, because the jay chose the source. The old squirrel on the far side of the hill was different, because she chose him herself and he had nothing to gain. I think that is the whole difference between asking and verifying.

I also keep wondering what the jay was afraid of. He wanted the nuts, obviously. But what he feared, I think, was the grey morning, when she would come back alone, without his voice in her ear, and count slowly.

I told Marcus a short version of the story in the lab today, while we were waiting for a sample to warm up. He said that he had seen a post like the one in our residence chat, in a different group, and that he had laughed at it. Then he said, "Imagine if one of them were real, though." He said it lightly, but he looked at his phone for a long time afterwards.

What I Checked This Week

The claim was a post in the residence group chat, saying that a "Student Investing Club" for first-years was making its members more money than their part-time jobs. The post looked as if it came from the residence, because its picture was a photo of our building. That was my first lesson of the week: a picture of something you trust is not the same as the thing you trust.

I asked Grandma's first question, "Who says so?", and I realised that I did not know. Then I asked the second question, "How can I check it myself?" The post offered its own way to check, "Message me", but that would only have given me more of the same claim. So I chose a different path and went in person to the reception desk, which I knew was real because I had walked past it with my suitcase.

The third question, "Who gains if I believe it?", was easy once the first two were answered. The only person who would gain from new students sending money to a club that did not exist was the person who wrote the post.

So this is what "verify" means, in my own words: to test whether a claim is true by using a source that I choose myself. It does not mean asking the person who made the claim, using the link they give me, calling the number they send, or trusting the friend they point me to. It means finding my own way to the truth, even if that way is only a staircase down to the reception desk. I did not need to understand anything about investing to do it. I only needed to find out who was really speaking.

Things to Talk About as a Family

Tess's diary pauses here for the week. She has arrived in a new place with her first money of her own, and almost at once someone has tried to use that newness. She did not need to be an expert or to be suspicious of everyone. She needed one habit, which was to check a claim through a path she chose herself.

Here are some questions to talk about together, at the table, on a call or on a walk. When you start something new, such as a school, a job or a move, what makes you want to fit in quickly, and how could that wish make an offer seem better than it is? Think of a message or a post that you saw recently: who said so, and how could you have checked it without using anything the message gave you? And who in your own life would be your "old squirrel on the far side of the hill", someone you would ask because you chose them, not because someone else sent you to them?

Here is one small thing to try together. Write Grandma Rose's three questions on a card: "Who says so? How can I check it myself? Who gains if I believe it?" Put the card where everyone in the family will see it, by the door or on the fridge. Over the next week, each person can bring one claim they met and tell the others how they checked it, or how they could have.