We build technology that’s on your side.
Sarah Wissel and Kim Stiefel · Co-founders, Scam Checker
Scammers use technology as a weapon. Texts that look official. Calls that know your name. Messages engineered to hit at exactly the right moment of uncertainty. The whole system is designed to confuse and rush — and it works.
Sarah and Kim have spent their careers building technology that does the opposite: tools that are honest about what they do, that respect the people using them, and that work for users instead of against them.
Scam Checker is that instinct applied to one of the most urgent problems they know.
The founding story
Before Scam Checker, Sarah and Kim built and exited Repeat, a software company for consumer brands. The core problem they were solving: the subscription model had become a trap. Companies were using auto-recurring billing to quietly extract money from people who weren’t paying attention — obscuring cancel buttons, burying terms, counting on inertia. Sarah and Kim built the version that respected consumers instead: technology that nudged people when they actually needed to reorder, rather than locking them in.
That experience left them with a clear point of view: technology should be on your side.
Then it got personal.
People they loved — parents, family friends, the older adults in their lives — started getting targeted. Not because they were careless. Because scammers are sophisticated. The tactics are engineered to work: urgency, authority, impersonation, fear. Sarah’s mother got hit with a gift card scam. People close to them came within a step or two of sending money they couldn’t get back.
What struck Sarah and Kim wasn’t just the financial risk. It was what happened before: the moment of uncertainty, the hesitation, the decision not to ask for help. Nobody wants to be the person who got fooled. Nobody wants to feel like a burden. So people stay quiet, try to figure it out alone, and sometimes that silence costs them.
Kim’s father runs a tech education club in his community, helping older adults understand the most common scam tactics. He can teach people to recognize patterns. What he can’t do is show up every time someone gets a suspicious text at 2pm on a Tuesday and doesn’t want to bother their kids.
Sarah and Kim are also in the thick of the sandwich generation — raising three young kids while trying to stay close to aging parents. They know what it means to love people you can’t always protect, and to not want those people to feel like they’re a problem to manage.
That’s what Scam Checker is: the thing that’s there when you can’t be. Private. Fast. Non-judgmental. You text a screenshot, you get an answer. No one has to know you checked.
What we believe
Technology should work for you, not against you.
Most internet businesses are built on tricking people — dark patterns, hidden fees, deceptive urgency. We’ve spent years trying to fix that. Scam Checker is the product that most directly lives this belief: it exists to protect people from exactly the kind of manipulation that other technologies enable.
Asking for help shouldn’t cost you your dignity.
The biggest barrier to avoiding scams isn’t confusion — it’s fear of looking foolish. Our product is designed to be private and non-judgmental. You don’t have to tell anyone you checked. That’s a feature, not an afterthought.
Caution is a strength, not a weakness.
Scammers are good at what they do. Being targeted doesn’t mean you’re naive. The right response to a suspicious message is to check — and that’s exactly what this product makes easy.
We never guarantee something is safe.
Because that would be a lie. We give you our best read, explain what we saw, and tell you what to do next. Always with a safety margin built in.
About the founders
Sarah Wissel and Kim Stiefel are co-founders of Scam Checker and partners in business and in life. Before Scam Checker, they built and exited Repeat, a software company focused on helping consumer brands build better relationships with their customers — without the dark patterns. They’re parents of three young kids and, like a lot of people their age, are also navigating what it means to watch out for aging parents in a world full of increasingly sophisticated scams. Scam Checker is what they built when they realized they couldn’t always be there — but something could be.
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