About

What this site is for

Every scam runs on a method. Kept out of sight, the method keeps working. Published, it stops working on everybody who has read it. That is the whole purpose of this site: to identify scams and put their method in public view, so fewer people are taken by them.

So we do two things. We catalogue the scams that are already known — one page per lure, the playbook start to finish, from the first message to where the money goes. And we work out the new ones while they are still spreading, so the next person does not have to be the one who finds out the hard way.

What is this site?

A public record of what people report. Somebody gets a message, a call or a listing that turns out to be a scam; they tell us the string that contacted them and what it asked for; a human checks it; and it becomes a page that the next person finds when they search that same string.

It is the companion to the How the Scam Works documentary channel. The videos explain how a scam is built. This site records the ones that are running right now.

How do we verify a report?

Every report is read by a person before anything is published. We check that there is a usable identifier, that the account matches a pattern we can describe, and that nothing in it identifies a private individual — the reporter or anybody else. Reports about named people are not published.

Aggregate figures on this site are counts of what reporters told us. Where we quote a number from outside — losses, arrests, seizures — we name the primary source and link to it, and it is always a public body or a published report, never a summary of a summary.

What do we publish, and what do we never publish?

We publish the identifier (the number, link, e-mail or handle), the lure, the channel, what payment was asked for, and the amount the reporter said they lost. We publish the pattern in our own words.

We never publish your name, your e-mail, your story verbatim without asking, or anything that could identify you or anybody else. We do not name individuals as scammers. An identifier can be spoofed, resold, or belong to somebody whose account was taken over — so a page here is a warning about a string, never a verdict about a person.

What happens to my data?

The report form asks for as little as possible. An e-mail address is optional and is only used to ask one clarifying question. There are no advertising trackers, no Google Analytics and no third-party scripts: page views are counted by a self-hosted Umami instance that stores no cookies and no personal data. Reports live in a database that is separate from everything else we run.

You get a protocol code instead of an account. It is how you check your report without telling us who you are.

What this site is not

It is not law enforcement, and we cannot recover money. If you have lost money, tell your bank immediately and file with your national fraud authority as well as here. It is not legal or financial advice. And it is educational: we explain how scams operate so you can spot them, never how to run them.