Report a Scammer

Who can report, and what we accept

Anyone with a Fraudpol account can report an individual or a group. You do not have to be the victim: a family member helping a parent, a moderator who keeps seeing the same account, or a company employee who found a coordinated operation targeting customers can all file a report. What matters is that the report is about online fraud or cybercrime and that it comes with evidence somebody else can check.

The kinds of cases Fraudpol handles:

• Investment and crypto fraud — fake trading platforms, "guaranteed return" schemes, wallet drainers, fake brokers and the groups that run them. See the crypto scammer reporting guide.
• Romance and dating scams — long-running relationship scams, including the ones that end in a fake investment platform. See the romance scammer guide.
• Fake shops — stores that take payment and never ship, including the networks that rebuild the same shop under new domains.
• Phishing campaigns — operators behind credential-harvesting pages, smishing waves and fake support lines. Background reading: what is phishing and what is vishing.
• Sextortion and extortion — threats to publish images or data unless you pay.
• Identity theft — misuse of your documents, accounts or identity for fraud, including impersonation profiles used to defraud other people.

What Fraudpol does not handle, and will close without investigating:

• Private disputes: disagreements between people who know each other, unpaid loans between friends, family or relationship conflicts.
• Harassment without a fraud link. Harassment is serious and belongs with the platform and the police, but it is not what this process is for.
• Reports aimed at competitors, journalists or activists.
• Requests to identify or locate a person where no fraud is shown by the evidence.

Reports must be truthful. A false accusation can be a criminal offence in many jurisdictions, and misuse of the reporting process leads to account suspension.

What happens after you report

Reports about people and groups are not automated. Nothing is published, nothing is sent anywhere automatically, and no identifier is acted on before a person has read the case.

1. Manual review. A team member checks whether the evidence actually shows a fraud link, whether at least one identifier is verifiable, and whether any exclusion above applies. If the case is outside scope or the evidence is not enough, it is rejected and you are told why.
2. Investigation. Accepted cases move to an internal investigation board where the identifiers you provided — domains, email addresses, phone numbers, wallet addresses, payment accounts, social and messenger profiles — are examined and connected. Every entry on the board has to carry a source.
3. Reports to platforms and providers. Where a platform, hosting provider, registrar or payment service has an abuse channel, the relevant part of the case is reported to it. Whether they act, and how fast, is their decision, not ours. Websites go through the normal website reporting and takedown route.
4. Evidence preservation. Before anything leaves the case, the material is frozen with cryptographic hashes so the state of the evidence can be shown later.
5. Referral to the competent authority. Where the facts support it, the case is referred to the authority responsible for the country involved, with a structured summary and the evidence package. A referral is not a prosecution, and we cannot promise any outcome.
6. Status updates. You follow your own case in your dashboard: received, in review, accepted, investigation running, referred, or closed. You will also get an email when the status changes. Internal notes and investigation material are not shared with reporters.

Your identity stays with the handling team. Fraudpol never shares reporter details with the reported party, and no case about an individual or group appears in the community, in the public threat registry, in search results on this site, or anywhere else public.

How to report a scammer to the police and to the FBI yourself

Always file your own report with the authorities as well. A private platform can document, escalate and refer, but only a law-enforcement body can investigate a person with legal powers, and only an official report creates the record your bank, insurer or employer may later ask for.

• United States: the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov takes complaints about internet-enabled fraud. Also consider the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov and your local police department for a local report number.
• United Kingdom: Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk, or Police Scotland by phone. Keep the Action Fraud reference number.
• Germany, Austria, Switzerland: the police run online reporting portals ("Onlinewache" in the German federal states, the police online reporting services in Austria and Switzerland), in addition to any local station.
• Elsewhere: most countries have either a national cybercrime reporting portal or a police online report form. Use the national police website, not a search advertisement.

Before you file, write a one-page timeline. It makes the report far more useful:

• When first contact happened, on which platform, and under which name or handle.
• Every payment: date, amount, currency, method, recipient name, account number, wallet address or transaction hash.
• Every identifier you have: profile URLs, usernames, phone numbers, email addresses, websites, company names used.
• Screenshots or exports of the conversation, with dates visible.
• What you were told the money was for, and what actually happened.

Your own report matters because authorities work from volume and patterns. A single complaint may look small; twenty complaints with the same wallet address or the same phone number look like an operation. Filing costs you nothing and improves everyone's chances, including yours.

Reporting a scammer’s phone number

Phone numbers are among the most-searched things to report, and among the least reliable identifiers. Caller ID can be spoofed, numbers are rented by the week, and messenger accounts can move to a new number in minutes. Report the number anyway — it still links cases together — but do not treat a displayed number as proof of who called.

Report the number to your mobile operator, to the messenger platform where it was used, to your national nuisance-call or fraud-reporting body, and include it in your police report. If the call impersonated a bank, a delivery company or a government office, tell the impersonated organisation too: they collect these numbers. For how voice-based fraud works and what to preserve, read what is vishing.

In a Fraudpol case a phone number is stored as one identifier among several. It is useful when it connects to a payment account, a messenger profile or a domain — not on its own.

What Fraudpol does not do

Being clear about the limits protects you from the people who will contact you next, promising exactly what we refuse to promise.

• We do not recover money. Fraudpol has no ability to reverse a transfer, freeze an account or claw back cryptocurrency. Your bank, card issuer, payment provider and the authorities are the channels that can act on money. Read the honest version in scammed? what to do now.
• We never charge victims a fee to recover funds, and we never contact victims unsolicited asking for payment. If someone claims to be Fraudpol and asks for money to release, unlock or recover your funds, it is a recovery scam.
• We do not publish cases. Reports about individuals and groups never appear publicly — not in the community, not in the registry, not in write-ups, not in a sitemap.
• We are not law enforcement. Fraudpol is an independent private platform operated by Blackwall Global LLC. It is not a government agency or a law enforcement body. It documents, reports to platforms and refers cases to the competent authorities.
• We do not promise outcomes or timelines. No arrests, no account bans, no guaranteed removals, no deadlines. What we can promise is that a person reads your case and that the evidence is preserved properly.
• We do not run people-search or doxxing requests. A request to identify someone without a fraud link shown by evidence is refused.

Guides for specific situations

What happens when you report a scammer?

Reporting has two separate tracks, and it helps to know which one you are on. A report to an authority such as the police, IC3 or a national fraud-reporting body enters an official record. It may be combined with other complaints about the same identifiers, and it is the only route that can lead to a criminal investigation. You usually receive a reference number, and in most countries you do not receive individual case updates.

A report to a platform, a bank, a payment provider or a hosting company is an operational report. It can lead to an account being restricted, a listing being removed or a website being taken offline. Platforms decide these cases internally, rarely explain the reasoning, and almost never tell you the outcome for a specific reported account.

A report to Fraudpol sits alongside both. A member of the team reads the case by hand and checks whether the evidence actually shows a fraud link. If it does, the case is accepted, the identifiers are examined, related infrastructure such as domains and wallets is documented, evidence is preserved with hashes, and reports go to the platforms and providers involved. Where the facts support it, the case is referred to the competent authority. You see the status of your own case in your dashboard: submitted, in review, accepted, investigation running, referred or closed. Nothing about the case is published, and the reported party never learns who filed it.

What no route can promise is a specific result. No report guarantees an arrest, an account ban, a takedown or a refund, and anyone who promises one of those in exchange for a payment is running a second scam. Filing early and with complete identifiers is still worth doing: it is what makes a pattern across many victims visible at all.

Can I report a scammer anonymously?

It depends on who receives the report. Most platforms treat reports as confidential: the reported account is not told who filed the report, although the platform itself knows your account. Some national crime-reporting bodies accept anonymous crime tips, but an anonymous report usually cannot be used to pursue a fraud claim on your behalf, because nobody can confirm the loss or answer follow-up questions. If money was taken from you, filing under your own name is almost always the stronger option.

At Fraudpol, reports about an individual or group require an account, so they are not anonymous to us. They are confidential towards the outside: your name, email address and any contact details stay inside the handling team, are never included in reports to platforms or in a referral package, and are never shown on the website. If Fraudpol sends an informational notice to a reported party, that notice contains no reporter or victim information at all. Cases about individuals or groups are never published, never appear in the community feed, the public registry, the search or the sitemap.

Frequently asked questions