Scam StepsUS, beta

About

What this is

A free guided workflow for US scam victims. Triage classifies the case; the plan orders the filings; the templates pre-fill the paperwork. No accounts, no payment, no data leaves your browser unless you submit it yourself through the official channels.

What this is not

Sources for the recovery-rate bands

Ranges are derived from public reports rather than internal data — treat them as orders of magnitude, not predictions. Categories combine signals from:

Aggregate bands are intentionally wide. A 5–15% band for crypto sent to an exchange means the population-level recovery rate falls in that range; individual cases vary by speed of filing, exchange policies, and whether the scammer has already withdrawn.

Privacy

Triage answers and incident details are stored in your browser's sessionStorage. They are not transmitted to this site, any server, or any third party. Closing the tab clears them. There is no account system because there is nothing to store between visits — every plan is regenerated from your triage inputs.

No analytics, no tracking, no cookies beyond what your browser sets by default. No external scripts load on the plan or template pages.

Updates

Filing procedures, bank policies, and recovery rates change. The data behind this site — scam categories, reporting channels, bank fraud pages, recovery-rate bands — is open and version-controlled. The annual review compares the bands against the latest FTC and IC3 reports and updates them in one place.

Why this exists

After a scam, the recovery process is fragmented across six or more independent systems. Victims either don't know the order of operations or don't know that some channels (bank dispute, exchange freeze, wire recall) have hard time windows that close before the others matter. The cost of that fragmentation is borne disproportionately by victims who could have recovered funds if they'd known to file in the right order. This is the simplest possible orchestrator for that problem.

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