Why We Built Fairhaven Maplewood
Margaret Holloway spent twelve years working in consumer protection at a citizens advice bureau in Osaka, where she watched the same patterns repeat year after year. Older adults, many of them sharp and capable, were being caught out not because they were careless but because the scams had become genuinely sophisticated. A phone call that sounded exactly like a bank. A website that looked identical to a government portal. In 2019, after her own mother received a convincing impersonation call that nearly resulted in a significant bank transfer, Margaret decided to do something more direct.
01 Scam database updated every 48 hours from live user reports
02 Every alert is written in plain English, no technical jargon
03 Support line answered by a real person, every hour of the day
04 All design decisions tested with adults over 60 before release
Margaret Holloway spent twelve years in consumer protection at a citizens advice bureau in Osaka before founding Fairhaven Maplewood in 2019. She previously led a regional fraud-awareness programme that ran workshops in community centres across the Kansai area, reaching several hundred older residents over four years. The experience of watching her own mother nearly fall victim to a bank-impersonation call in 2018 pushed her from awareness work into building something practical. Margaret tests every new feature herself on a laptop she deliberately keeps set to large-font mode, because she believes if it is not easy for her to use at that setting, it is not ready. Outside work, she tends a small vegetable garden in Nara and is a committed but mediocre amateur watercolourist.
- 01Verso
- 02HARBOR
- 03South Light
- 04Common Goods