It's a sad fact of modern life; if you haven't been scammed already, you've definitely come close.

Nothing makes you feel more gullible than catching yourself with your finger poised to click that link to pay your "outstanding road toll." Or thinking, "As a matter of fact, I AM expecting a package." Then wondering why you'd have to pay to receive it. And who wouldn't want to earn up to $457 an hour working from home?

Although, taken out of context, these sorts of scams all seem pretty obvious, I know from experience if you happen to receive the wrong email, message or text at just the right time, anyone can be susceptible to the latest con.

So what you need is some kind of online chaperone. Someone who's seen it all before, looking over your shoulder, calling out anything suspicious and encouraging you to think before you click.

Avast has come up with new feature that does pretty much exactly that. It's been included in Avast Free Antivirus at no extra cost and if you subscribe to Avast Premium Security, you'll get an even more advanced version, called Scam Guardian Pro.

Early last year I reviewed a similar product from Avast's sister company called Norton Genie. Back then, this was an online tool you could copy and paste suspicious text and web links into to check if they were the real deal. This year Norton incorporated the feature into its paid cybersecurity suites so it's probably no surprise to see Avast matching the offering.

What IS surprising is to see much of Scam Guardian's functionality added to Avast Free Antivirus. 

I've dabbled with several free cyber-security apps over the years and I'd have to say, I keep coming back to Avast as one of the best free offerings out there - by adding scam protection, obviously it only gets better.

But in order to test the full power of what Avast has come up with to keep scammers at bay, I've been supplied with a subscription to Avast Security Premium. The subscription version has quite a few extra goodies bundled into it; you can protect multiple devices, set up your own firewall and even keep all your apps up to date automatically.

Weirdly, when I logged into Avast on my Android phone, I received a further upgrade to Avast Ultimate - more features still, including a VPN and a junk file cleanup tool.

Turns out, there's also a bit of a difference with how Scam Guardian works on my Mac compared to my phone.

The desktop version displays a Scam Guardian tab on the home dashboard. Once you click this you're presented with an AI prompt window to paste your questionable text or link into. The Scam Guardian will attempt to do its thing and if it can't initially find any details connected with the info you've inputted, you can then ask it to do a deeper search. Scam Guardian will let you know which sites are safe, which aren't and perhaps most importantly, it'll admit if it's not sure and will encourage you to proceed with the proper precautions.

In fact, you can ask it anything about cyber security and safe online practices, making it one of the more useful forms of AI I've interacted with.

You can also grant Scam Guardian permission to monitor your web-browser to ensure you don't venture anywhere too risky online. And if you give Scam Guardian access to your email accounts, it will scan all messages as they come in for questionable content. This must be some kind of beta feature though, because while I could easily add my personal Gmail accounts for Scam Guardian's perusal, it told me it wasn't able to add my work address. Actually, that's probably just work IT being a little heavy-handed with its own high levels of cyber security.

The mobile app on my Android phone seemed a little more streamlined. You grant Scam Guardian the required access to your email and messages as part of setting up the Avast app when you first sign in. If you want websites monitored, you then designate Avast Safe Browser as your default - although oddly, this doesn't mean you end up using that browser. Instead, you nominate your preferred browser in the Avast app (mine is Arc for example) and then, what seems to happen, is when you click a link, Avast Safe Browser checks it first and if it's legit, hands it over to your usual browser and you take it from there.

So the scam monitoring is more behind-the-scenes on the phone version of the app - no AI box to paste text or links into.

Both versions seem to do an excellent job and you can check the automatically generated log to make sure all links have been scanned appropriately.

Look, I know you probably think only idiots get scammed and you'd have to be thick not to spot one but what if?... And if you can make use of Avast Scam Guardian for free, why wouldn't you?

Click here for more information and pricing on Avast Premium Security.