Your Advocate wants to fight fraud with something joyful: bingo. Fraud Bingo will turn a familiar social game into a lively, practical workshop where Chicago-area seniors learn to spot red flags, protect their money, and leave with tools they can use immediately.
Since its inception in 2024, Your Advocate has educated more than 800 seniors, family members, and caregivers about scam prevention techniques through 18 workshops held primarily in senior centers and churches throughout Chicago. With this funding, we can quickly combine Fraud Bingo with the full power of our workshops to educate at least 300 more participants in Chicago-area communities over the next few months, and thousands more over the next one to two years. This will be an awesome start to turning neighborhood gathering spaces into scam-prevention hubs that are both educational and joyful.
The project’s fun factor has research behind it. Multiple studies suggest that social games can support cognitive health in seniors, so integrating bingo into workshops can help older participants not only learn scam-prevention strategies but also better retain them.
Additionally, this project will capitalize on bingo’s popularity to attract more public workshop hosts, like libraries, and greater cross-sections of Chicago seniors and their families.

This project is all about turning something scary into a fun learning experience, and data speaks to its urgency. While scams target people of all ages, recent data shows that seniors are among the most frequently victimized.
Your Advocate's workshops arm seniors with vital information. The Awesome Foundation Chicago can help us to attract more hosts and participants, strengthen participants' recall of important points, and make the experiences fun social experiences!