Friday 26 June, 2026
This article from GSMA member SquareTrade highlights growing digital risks for children and adults, urging stronger protections beyond physical safety. Calling for industry-wide solutions addressing scams, fraud, evolving threats in an increasingly connected world.
The UK’s Online Safety Act places legal responsibilities on technology platforms to protect children from harmful content, marking a milestone moment in digital protection.
Technology has increased children’s safety in remarkable ways. Parents can see their children’s locations, stay connected through video and messaging, and even monitor their physical wellbeing. Yet this rapid pace of technological advancement has introduced risks. While we are becoming proficient at protecting children in the physical world, the digital world presents challenges that current solutions aren’t adequately addressing.
Digital protections in a changing world
Today’s children spend much of their time on a device – whether for communicating with friends, gaming and education, to entertainment.
Despite this, only 21% of parents in the UK are actively using online parental controls for children aged 8-15. Many parents simply don’t know the risks their children could face, or lack accessible tools to address these dangers. The pace of technology is evolving faster than our understanding of it and the availability of effective safety measures.
Children face modern-day dangers – from cyberbullying that follows them home, to financial scams targeting young people, and even data breaches that could impact their futures.
But it isn’t just young people facing challenges. Older generations face their own distinct risks in this digital age: they have limited digital literacy and are vulnerable to sophisticated scams. Banking, paying bills, and booking appointments, once simple tasks, now require navigating app updates, interface changes, two-factor authentication and more. Each new security measure, while necessary, becomes another barrier for those learning digital skills.
Within this landscape, bad actors, like scammers, understand these vulnerabilities with calculated precision. In Germany, the Enkeltrick (grandchild trick) has become a widespread scam, with criminals posing as grandchildren in distress, using vulnerability and emotion to defraud elderly victims. Impersonation scams generated an estimated €10.6 billion in financial losses in 2025. Victims in the UK lost on average £4,000 per scam, with a staggering £7.4 billion stolen from the elderly annually.
An accelerating threat landscape
Without intervention, these vulnerabilities will only deepen as technology advances. By 2030 PWC forecasts that fraud will become the most commonly reported crime, with fraudsters increasing their use of AI-powered tools to fabricate identities and manipulate victims more convincingly.
This includes the rise of AI-powered document manipulation and synthetic identity fraud. The accessibility of these tools has lowered the barrier to entry for cybercriminals. What once required sophisticated technical knowledge can now be accomplished using online tools and tutorials.
The scale of the problem becomes clear when you consider that 45% of 8-17 years olds have already encountered scams online. Unlike physical threats we can teach children to avoid, digital threats operate silently in the background. Even with heightened awareness, prevention isn’t always possible.
Keeping children safe requires both understanding risks and having protection that provides support throughout the entire device experience, from incident prevention to providing actionable guidance and hands-on resolution support when incidents do occur.
Evolving beyond physical protection
As technology continues to advance, consumer protection needs to keep pace. We can’t eliminate all dangers, but providers can design solutions that meet consumer challenges and provide genuine support in navigating modern risks. The goal isn’t to restrict children or those less digitally savvy from using technology, rather to give everyone the confidence to engage with digital tools with peace of mind.
Achieving this requires device protection providers to rethink their role – expanding from hardware to the entire digital life our devices enable and the vulnerabilities we’re exposed to with every interaction.
The path forward
For parents, this requires us to think beyond what we have been used to; actively monitoring financial information tied to digital wallets, staying alert to data breaches, and understanding usage of personal data collection and the potential sharing of this. These lessons similarly apply to all of us, as we become increasingly digitally reliant.
For the industry, there is no time to waste. Only by addressing the full threat landscape from the hardware to the information accessible through it – we can truly protect the generation growing up in a connected world.
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