Your phone buzzes: “Your package could not be delivered, click here to reschedule.” Your thumb hovers over the link for maybe ten seconds. That’s the gap where most scams actually win, and it’s exactly what a Redditor named u/Professional-Rest138 built a fix for. It’s the kind of thing you wish someone had shown you before the last sketchy text landed in your inbox.
🎯 Why It Matters
Here’s the part that got me: scams don’t play out over days anymore. Most run their course inside 40 minutes. That’s not enough time to “sleep on it” or ask a friend. You either catch it in that first glance or you don’t.
The old advice was to look for bad grammar and weird phrasing. This Redditor points out why that’s dead advice now. A scammer can feed a real company’s actual emails into an AI and get something that reads perfectly. So the writing quality tells you nothing anymore. What still tells you something is whether the pattern matches a known scam. That requires actual threat intelligence, not an AI politely guessing based on vibes.
That’s the trick behind this prompt. It routes your question through Norton Genie or Malwarebytes, free connectors that plug into both ChatGPT and Claude. Both are backed by real scam databases instead of a language model’s best guess.
🛠️ How To Run The Check
First, get the connector installed. It takes under a minute and you don’t need to pay either company a cent.
- On ChatGPT: open the sidebar, click “Apps,” search “Norton Genie” or “Malwarebytes,” hit add.
- On Claude: go to Settings, then Connectors, search the same names.
Once it’s connected, here’s the core prompt the original poster uses for a suspicious text or email:
Is this a scam: [paste the message exactly as you got it, or upload a screenshot]
Tell me specifically what makes it look legitimate or suspicious, whether it matches a known scam pattern, and what I should do next, block, report, or ignore.
Notice what this prompt is actually doing. It’s not asking “is this sketchy,” which invites a vague hedge. It’s asking for the specific signal, the pattern match, and a concrete next action. That’s the difference between an AI rambling at you and an AI giving you something you can act on in five seconds.
For links you haven’t clicked yet:
Check this link before I click it: [paste it]. Is this a real site, a lookalike, or something dangerous?
And for marketplace deals that feel a little off:
Here’s a conversation with someone I’m buying from: [paste the messages]. Does anything here match a common marketplace scam, and how do I respond safely?
Same shape every time: paste the raw thing, ask for the pattern match, ask for the next step. That’s the whole system, and it works on the free tier of both apps.
Two small tweaks worth trying on the core prompt. Add “rate your confidence from 1 to 10” at the end, so “uncertain” turns into an actual number instead of a vague vibe. Or add “draft a polite reply I can send back” when the sender might be a hacked friend, not a random scammer.
💡 Tips & Tricks
- Treat “uncertain” as a yellow light, not a green one. The original poster makes a good point here: if the AI comes back unsure, that’s not a false alarm. It’s the AI being honest that it hasn’t seen this exact pattern categorized yet. Uncertain means be careful, not probably fine.
- Paste the message exactly as received. Don’t summarize it yourself first. The threat intelligence behind these connectors is matching against real patterns, and paraphrasing can strip out the exact detail that would’ve flagged it.
- Screenshots work too. If the scam is a fake app notification or a weird popup, a screenshot gets you the same analysis as pasted text.
- Run the marketplace version before you send money, not after. The prompt is built for exactly that “something feels off” moment before you commit.
- Save the prompts somewhere you’ll actually find them. The next scam text won’t wait for you to remember the wording. This contributor keeps a running doc of a hundred prompts like these, worth a browse once this becomes your habit.
🚀 Give It A Shot
Next sketchy text that lands in your inbox, don’t sit there squinting at it for ten seconds hoping your gut is right. Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude with Norton Genie or Malwarebytes connected and let real threat data make the call. Hop over to the original Reddit thread if you want to see how other people are already using it and swap ideas in the comments!
you can paste a sketchy text or email into chatgpt and get a real scam check now, backed by actual threat intelligence rather than the ai guessing. works on the free plan
by u/Professional-Rest138 in ChatGPTPromptGenius