Online Presence Scrub

Americans lost an estimated $196 billion to scammers last year. Phishing and spoofing scams surged 85% year over year, and deepfake fraud attempts jumped over 2,000% in three years. The scam industry is scaling fast, and the raw material they run on is your personal data sitting on broker sites anyone can buy from.

The wake-up call: My parents just recently retired, and the targeting ramped up immediately. More frequent, more sophisticated, harder to spot. Bailey and I started getting hit too. One that almost got me: a text about an eye doctor appointment, timed to the same four-hour window as my actual appointment, with a link that looked completely legit. When scammers can buy your appointment history, your address, your phone number, and your daily patterns off a data broker for a few bucks, that's all they need. The cheap, low-effort scam artists thrive on this stuff.

The system I built:

Incogni runs automated removal requests against data broker sites on my behalf, both known ones and ones I'd never heard of. It handles the back-and-forth with the brokers, tracks which ones comply, and re-checks monthly. That alone is worth it. But I extended the value even further by pairing it with Claude.

Once a month, I run a session with Claude where we search for my information across known sites and unknown sites, looking for anywhere my data might still be exposed. Claude helps me identify new brokers, draft removal requests, and spot patterns I'd miss on my own. I paste in 8-9 manual removal requests per session, things Incogni doesn't cover or sites that need a human touch. The combination of automated + manual, running on a monthly cadence, has been incredible.

The easy win nobody talks about: Go to myactivity.google.com and lock down what Google knows about you and what shows up in search. Takes 10 minutes. Most people have never touched these settings, and it controls a surprising amount of what the internet can see about you.

The family plan: Incogni offers a family plan, and honestly it's probably the best deal in the privacy space right now. I've got my parents and Bailey on it. Scrubbing one person is good. Securing your whole family is how you actually reduce the attack surface. In an era where fraud is growing 25% year over year and AI is making scams indistinguishable from real communications, this is one of the few proactive things you can do that actually moves the needle.

Tools: Incogni for automated data broker removal, Claude for monthly manual sweeps and removal request drafting, myactivity.google.com for Google privacy controls, and a tracking sheet for what's been found and removed.