About
Scam Steps turns "what happened" into an ordered list of what to do — the calls to make first, the agencies and forms that apply, and editable drafts of every report.
What it is
- Free. No accounts, no payment, no upsell.
- Self-serve. Everything runs in your browser.
- A filing aid — it orders the steps and pre-fills the paperwork.
What it isn't
- Not a recovery service. It never contacts banks or agencies for you.
- Not legal advice. Over ~$10,000, or for civil action, see a consumer-protection attorney.
- Not international. US channels only, for now.
Where the recovery numbers come from
The recovery-rate bands are derived from public reports, not internal data. They are population averages — orders of magnitude, not predictions for any single case. The bands are deliberately wide: an individual outcome depends on how fast you file, the institution's policies, and whether the money has already moved.
- FTC Consumer Sentinel annual reports — loss totals by category and payment method.
- CFPB complaint database — resolution outcomes for Regulation E disputes, including Zelle imposter scams before and after the 2023 policy shift.
- FBI IC3 annual reports — case counts and wire-fraud kill-chain recoveries.
- Published bank dispute policies — Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, Citi, Capital One.
- CFPB sample dispute-letter language and the FTC identitytheft.gov flow — the basis for the templates.
The bands are reviewed annually against the latest FTC and IC3 reports. The underlying data — scam categories, channels, bank pages — is open and version-controlled.
Your privacy
Your triage answers and incident details stay in your browser and are never transmitted to this site or anyone else. Close the tab and they're gone — there is no account because there is nothing to store. No analytics, no tracking, no third-party scripts.
Why it exists
After a scam, recovery is fragmented across six or more separate systems — and some of them, like bank disputes and wire recalls, have deadlines that close within hours. People lose recoverable money simply for not knowing the order of operations. This site is the simplest tool that fixes that.