There is a dangerous idea quietly gaining ground in marketing and public communication: that confusing people is an acceptable way to educate them.
The logic sounds clever. Shock people. Trick them safely. Reveal the lesson afterward. Wake them up.
But safety does not work that way.
Public safety education is not about cleverness. It is about consistency. And when an institution tasked with protecting people deliberately behaves like the threat it warns against, the result is not vigilance. It is erosion.
The problem with teaching through imitation
Scam prevention relies on simple, rigid rules because real-life decisions are made quickly, emotionally, and often under stress. For years, the most effective rule taught to the public has been clear: do not click links in unsolicited messages, especially those that promise rewards or urgency.
Some recent safety campaigns have broken that rule first, then explained it later.
The message arrives unsolicited. It uses reward language. It includes a clickable link. It leads to an official page. Only after the click does the lesson appear.
That sequence matters.
People learn not from what institutions say, but from what they reward. In these cases, the act of clicking is rewarded with legitimacy. The lesson may be verbal, but the conditioning is behavioral.
That is not education. That is negative training.
Confusion is not a teaching tool
Defenders of shock-based safety messaging often argue that traditional education has failed, so doing the opposite is necessary. This misunderstands how safety learning works.
You do not improve fire safety by occasionally lighting controlled fires in offices. You do not improve road safety by rewarding reckless driving to make a point. And you do not improve scam awareness by normalizing scam aesthetics.
Safety depends on predictability. People protect themselves by recognizing patterns and responding reflexively. When a trusted institution deliberately introduces ambiguity, it weakens those reflexes.
The most dangerous moment in a scam is not ignorance. It is hesitation.
After campaigns that blur safety signals, the next scam that passes basic checks becomes harder to reject. Users pause. They wonder if this might be another legitimate campaign. That pause is exactly what criminals exploit.
Harm is not measured only in money lost
Another common defense is that no harm was done because no money or personal information was lost. This is a narrow and outdated view of consumer harm.
Under consumer protection principles, harm includes confusion, false expectations, anxiety, desensitization, and erosion of trust. Damage is not limited to pesos lost. It includes weakened defenses.
This is especially important in financial and digital services, where one wrong click can have irreversible consequences. Institutions operating in high-consequence environments are not pranksters. Their authority rests on seriousness, clarity, and predictability.
When they temporarily behave like scammers, even for awareness, they forfeit part of that authority.
Why regulation emphasizes clarity
It is not accidental that regulators consistently emphasize clarity and consistency in anti-fraud communication. The intent is not to stifle creativity but to prevent exactly this kind of ambiguity.
Regulation exists not only to punish harm after it occurs but also to stop practices that normalize unsafe behavior before harm happens. Safety standards are designed to reinforce clear signals of legitimacy and danger. Campaigns that blur those signals may not always violate the letter of the rules, but they undermine their purpose.
Clever is not the same as responsible
Marketing culture rewards novelty, disruption, and talk value. Safety culture rewards boredom, repetition, and discipline. These values will always be in tension.
But in systems built on trust, safety must win.
Calling a campaign smart because it exploits a lack of knowledge should give us pause. Public safety campaigns exist to reduce knowledge gaps, not weaponize them. When confusion becomes the mechanism, the line between education and manipulation disappears.
This does not mean institutions should stop educating users about scams. It means they should do so without violating the very rules they are trying to teach.
Education can be firm without being deceptive. It can be memorable without being misleading. And it can be effective without training people to second-guess their instincts.
The real lesson
The real lesson here is not about any single campaign. It is about boundaries.
In an age of shrinking attention and rising digital threats, the temptation to shock will grow. But trust-based institutions must hold themselves to a higher standard.
Safety is built on consistency. Trust is built on predictability. Once those are compromised, no amount of post campaign explanation can fully undo the damage.
In public safety, the opposite of boring is not effective. It is reckless.
And recklessness has no place in systems where people’s livelihoods, savings, and peace of mind are on the line.