How to spot a scam

Card networks give you chargeback rights and vet the businesses they onboard. Gift cards, crypto and bank transfers are irreversible and unvetted, which is exactly why fraud prefers them. No legitimate shop, employer, bank or government department requires payment in gift cards — that request alone identifies the transaction. Whatever reason is offered for avoiding cards, the recourse you give up is worth more than the reason.

Nearly every impersonation scam begins with them contacting you — a call about suspicious activity, a text about a delivery, an email about an account. The pressure exists to stop you verifying. Hang up and call back on the number printed on your card or the official website, never a number given in the message. That single step ends the entire category.

No bank moves your money to a safe account, and no legitimate caller needs a one-time passcode you were sent. Both instructions identify the call as fraudulent regardless of how convincing the caller is, what number appeared on your screen, or how much they already seem to know about you. Caller ID is trivially spoofed.

Nobody can guarantee a return in a market that moves. Anyone promising a fixed percentage per day, week or month is either running a fraud or does not understand what they are selling. Watch the softer forms too — “consistent monthly income”, “passive income on autopilot”, “we cover your losses”. Sustained high fixed yields are paid out of new deposits rather than earnings, and that structure has a well-documented ending.

Nobody sells current-season branded goods below cost across an entire range. A store discounting everything by 70–90% is selling counterfeits, selling nothing at all, or collecting card details. One genuine clearance line is normal; a whole site of them is not.

Legitimate employers pay you. Training fees, equipment deposits, background-check costs and mandatory software purchases are all the same scam wearing different clothes. So is being asked to receive payments into your account and forward them, or to accept and reship parcels — that is money laundering and parcel muling, and the account holder carries the legal exposure.

Sustained refusal to appear live, at a moment you choose, is the most reliable single indicator that someone is not who their photos show. Recorded clips, stills and voice notes prove nothing. The excuses are practised and will sound reasonable — a broken camera, a bad connection, a job that forbids it.

The emergency, the customs fee, the medical bill, the trading platform where they are doing well — these are the same request in different clothes, and the first small one is a test of whether you will pay. Being moved quickly off the dating or social platform onto a private messaging app is part of the method, because those platforms detect and remove these accounts.

AnyDesk, TeamViewer and screen sharing hand over your device and any banking session on it. No genuine bank, retailer or software company needs remote control of your computer to help you, and nobody legitimate will ask you to log into your bank while they watch.

If you are contacted by someone offering to recover funds for an upfront fee, that is a second fraud targeting victims of the first. Lists of people who have already been defrauded circulate and are sold between criminals. No legitimate recovery service, law firm or agency asks for money up front to get your money back.