Every day, another senior loses their savings. Another family member feels the guilt of not protecting them. Another community asks why this keeps happening. ObserIQ exists because better software was never going to solve a problem rooted in human psychology.
ObserIQ started with a simple observation: every fraud prevention program we saw treated scams like a technology problem. Better spam filters. Smarter caller ID. More AI. These tools help, but they fail at the only moment that actually matters; the moment a real human being is on the phone with someone who has manufactured a crisis.
By the time a victim enters their credit card number or walks to the bank to wire money, the scam is already over. The decisive moment happened minutes or hours earlier, when the scammer triggered an emotional state so overwhelming that rational thinking shut down entirely. No software can intervene there. Only the person on the call can.
So we built a program that meets people at the decisive moment; not with an app, but with a psychological framework they can use before the call even happens. That program is Stop the Rush.
Every successful scam exploits the same levers; urgency, authority, isolation. You can’t patch human psychology with an app. You have to teach people to recognise the pattern and build habits that short-circuit it before the moment arrives.
Most fraud goes unreported because victims feel stupid. We reject that framing entirely. Falling for a sophisticated scam means you’re human, not gullible. Our materials, workshops, and tone are built to remove shame, because silence is what keeps the cycle going.
Our end users are adults 65+ and newcomers to Canada. AODA and WCAG 2.1 AA are the floor, not the ceiling. High-contrast, plain language, and printed reinforcement aren’t polish, they’re the entire point.
The best fraud prevention doesn’t come out of a boardroom. It comes from listening to the people being targeted, understanding their lived experience, and building tools that fit into their lives, not our assumptions about their lives.
ObserIQ is led by Jacob Ssekitto, whose path from grassroots refugee advocacy to fraud intelligence strategy shapes everything about how the company operates. The rest of the team spans legal administration, software engineering, and community outreach; with backgrounds across Canada and Uganda, academic research and frontline humanitarian work.
We are intentionally cross-disciplinary. Fraud prevention at the scale we’re building requires legal rigour, technical depth, and lived understanding of the communities we’re protecting; not just security expertise.
Meet the full team →Municipalities, institutions, researchers, and community partners, we’re always happy to have a conversation about how to build community safety together.