Shipping
Vigil
It reads an email or a text message you are unsure about, scores it, explains what it found, and recommends what to do next. It ships on iPhone, with Android planned.
A software company working on one problem
Vigilcode builds AI tools that help people recognize scams before they act on them.
Why this is harder than it was
Scam messages used to be easy to spot. They are not any more. The same models that write a decent email write a convincing one, at volume, in any language, with none of the spelling mistakes that used to give the game away. The advice people were given for twenty years, look for bad grammar, look for a generic greeting, was advice about a problem that has since changed shape.
We build for the moment someone is holding a message they are not sure about.
Patented architecture
U.S. Patent No. 12,500,909 covers our system for bi-directional message scoring using feature extraction, contextual refinement, and synthesis.
In practice that describes a loop rather than a verdict. A first pass scores the message on what can be read from the text itself. Where that score is uncertain, the system asks the reader a question only they can answer, about context the message cannot contain. The answer feeds back in and the score is reconsidered.
That second step is the part worth patenting. A classifier that only reads the message can never know whether you were actually expecting a package.
A continuation covering enterprise deployment is pending.
The scoring runs on your device
Sentinel, the model behind every score, runs on the phone. The text of a message is never sent to us. There is nothing for us to store, sell, or lose.
This is an architectural decision rather than a policy one, which means it is the kind of claim that can be checked instead of trusted. It also constrains the product, and we would rather say so: a model that ships inside an app has to be small enough to ship inside an app, and it is retrained and redeployed as scam techniques change rather than quietly updated on a server.
What we have built
Specified and not yet built
ScopedURL
It renders a web page as a static image, so you can see where a link goes without going there, and reports the scripts and onward links the page carries.
Vigilcode is the company behind both.