The other day my nephew texted. Was it OK to call me?

It sounded important. I mean, I hadn’t heard from him in years. Many years.

To give you an idea of how long it’s been, I still think of Kevin as a teenager, and he’s now in his mid-30s.

It seems he was having problems logging on to his Social Security account.

I could relate to that. In the last year or so, there has been a big change in the way one logs into the Social Security web site. I’m fully aware that they have to be extremely cautious about security, but as I told Kevin, I found it so confusing, I wondered how other senior citizens were able to navigate through the labyrinthine corridors to get into their accounts. I wasn’t really surprised that Kevin was having problems as well.

But that wasn’t his main concern. After several failed attempts at using his password at the old system, he had searched Google and discovered the new method for logging into his account. He was now afraid he had fallen prey to a nefarious phishing scheme.

I tried to explain that if he looked at the URL of the site he landed on, the part that’s shown in the address bar of the web browser, and it has a “dot gov” in it, then he’s gotten to a legitimate government web site.

So for example, if he went to the Social Security Administration site, it should look something like this: https://http://www.ssa.gov/xxxxxxxxxx

I told him I thought he was ok.

In retrospect I should have been a bit more positive. 

We spoke for 13 minutes and there really wasn’t much more that I could tell him. Luckily he had taken screen shots of the site he was at and he sent them to me and they showed that he was indeed at a “dot gov” site.

Where he got confused was that he landed there via a Google link, and it showed a “Sponsored Result” tag. So he was worried that he had gotten to some bogus site.

Given everything that’s going on, with all the nonsense about AI and last year’s DOGE bullshit with Elon Musk, I couldn’t really blame him for being worried.

But I believe I finally convinced him that he had gotten to the real, one and only SSA site.