Editorial policy

On a subject where bad advice costs people their savings, how something was written matters as much as what it says. This page states the rules we hold ourselves to, so you can check whether we follow them.

Sourcing

Where a guide rests on a law, a regulator's circular, an advisory or a reported case, it links the primary source: the gazette, the RBI or SEBI circular, the I4C or CERT-In advisory, the court order, the news report, so you can read it yourself instead of trusting our summary. If a claim cannot be sourced, it is either stated as our own assessment and labelled as one, or it does not go in.

Numbers carry their as-of date, because loss figures and case counts are revised. Where an official series runs only to the last complete year, the guide says so rather than implying the figure is current.

What we will not publish

• Invented cases, invented victims or invented quotes.
• Working attack instructions. Guides describe how a scam is recognised, never how it is run.
• Identifying details of anyone who contacts us. If something we are sent informs a guide, it appears in general terms with identifying detail removed.
• Certainty we do not have. Attribution is stated at the level the evidence supports, and superlatives we cannot verify get softened, the corrections below include an instance of exactly that.
• Fear as a marketing device. Nothing here is written to make you frightened enough to buy something.

Corrections

We get things wrong. When we do, the fix is visible rather than quiet:

• A dated Corrections section at the foot of the guide says what changed and why.
• The Updated date at the top of the page changes, and that date drives the listing order, so revised guides are findable.
• Substantive errors are corrected in place. We do not delete a page to make a mistake disappear.

Found something wrong? Tell us at scamnextstep@gmail.com with the page and what is incorrect. Corrections take priority over everything else in that inbox.

Guides and investigations

The site publishes two kinds of page. A guide (31 of them) is written for someone who may be in trouble right now: what the scam looks like, how to tell, what to do in the next hour. An investigation (1) is the underlying evidence record, published so the claims in a guide can be checked rather than believed. Investigations are longer, more technical, and are never the right page to send someone mid-incident.

Who writes

Every guide carries the names of the people who wrote it, and the About page says who they are. No pseudonyms, no house byline hiding who is accountable.

Independence and funding

No advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsored guides, no paid placements, no referral fees from any bank, app or security product we mention. We are not funded by, and do not speak for, any government body, police force, bank or vendor.

Everything a member of the public uses here is free and stays free: the guides, the checker, the posters, and having something verified. We do not charge a person who has been scammed.

Two paid services exist, both sold to organisations and never to a person who has been scammed: incident response and brand protection, listed together on the business page. They are deliberately walled off: no guide promotes either, no client has any influence over what gets written, and no reader of this site is ever the customer. Neither is ever sold as money recovery, because nobody can promise to recover funds for a fee and anyone who does is running the follow-up scam. If any of that stops being true, it will be stated here before it affects a single guide.

The site is run and paid for by Sai Samarth and Ashok Kamat. If that ever changes, sponsorship, grant funding, anything with an interest in what we publish, it will be disclosed on this page before it affects a single guide.

Reader submissions

What people send us shapes what we write about: a pattern arriving from several people in a week is usually the next guide. How that material is handled, stored and deleted is set out on the privacy page.