More on reporting scams

Often when victims ask "Where can I report these scams?" what they really want to know is how they recover the money that they lost. The sad truth is that there is no place that you can report this scam to that will be able to recover your money. To the scam victims, at the moment that they realized that they have been scammed it seems like it would be easy to find and arrest the scammer, and recover the money lost . . . you have their name, email address, phone number and maybe even a mailing address . . . but most if not all of those items are fakes that they use for their "profile", and the other issue that comes up is jurisdiction, which we spoke about earlier.

So then what can be done?

Different scam fighting websites have different approaches to how they "fight back" against these scammers.

At Scam Victims United we take the approach of providing information about scams in order to try and educate people before they become a victim. We have created a Facebook Fan Page in order to bring our message where people "hang out". We would like to see scam education brought into the school systems so that we can give the next generation the tools and resources that they need to recognize and avoid these scams. We allow people to post scam emails that they receive so that then names, email addresses and company names being used in the scams will come up in search engines. We also encourage people to report these scams, as we talked about earlier.


“Scam Baiting" is another way of fighting back, and there are websites devoted to this. Scam Baiting is pretending to be interested in the scammer's offer in order to waste their time, and money, by having them send you counterfeit checks. The site that I would recommend on this topic is 419eater.com because they will assist new "baiters" in learning the best way to go about this in order to
protect yourself.

Other sites focus on different ways of shutting down the scammers fake websites and closing the emailing accounts that they use by reporting them to the hosting sites or mail providers. One of these sites would be http://report-online-scams.com

While these sites cannot help you recover your money, they can help you to do something to fight scams. Education is the key to fighting scams, so talk about it with your friends and family and share sites like this with people you know.


Shawn Mosch
Co-Founder of ScamVictimsUnited.com
There is strength in numbers!

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