Terms of use

Plain terms for a free public site. Using it means you accept them.

What this site is

Scamnextstep publishes free guides about scams in India, written and operated by Sai Samarth and Ashok Kamat from Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. It is public-awareness material.

What it is not

• Not legal advice. Guides describe the law as we understand it at the time of writing. Your situation may differ. If you need advice you can rely on, speak to a lawyer.
• Not law enforcement. We investigate the public record, but we have no legal authority: we cannot compel anyone, summon, seize or arrest, and nothing we find has the standing of a police finding. Reporting to us is not reporting a crime. Report at 1930 and cybercrime.gov.in.
• Not a recovery service. We cannot get your money back and will never offer to. Anyone who does, including anyone using our name, is running the follow-up scam that targets people who have already lost money once.
• Not a monitored emergency channel. Nobody is on duty. If money is moving now, call 1930 rather than messaging us.

Accuracy, and acting on what you read

Scam scripts change weekly, helpline procedures change, and portals get redesigned. We correct what we find wrong and date the correction, but we cannot promise every guide is current or complete. Verify anything that matters against the official source we link to, and use your own judgement before acting. To the extent the law allows, we accept no liability for loss arising from acting, or not acting, on anything published here.

The free verification, specifically

If you send us something to check, we give you an assessment based on the public record and on patterns we have documented. It is best-effort, drawn from what you send us and what is publicly discoverable, given without charge and without any promise of a response time. It is not a forensic finding, not evidence, and not a guarantee either way, we can be wrong, and a message we cannot identify is not thereby safe. Decisions about your money, your devices and your accounts remain yours.

Using this site fairly

Do not send us material you have no right to share, do not send malware deliberately, do not use our name to represent yourself as us, and do not use the site to harass anyone. We may stop responding to anyone who does.

Reusing the guides

Share them. Forward a link, print a guide, read one aloud to a parent, put it in a housing-society group, that is what it is for, and no permission is needed. If you republish more than a short quote, credit Scamnextstep and link to the original page, so corrections reach your readers too. Do not present the material as your own, and do not use it to sell something.

Other sites we link to

We link to government portals, advisories and news reports so claims can be checked. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content.

Law

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Bengaluru, Karnataka, India have jurisdiction over disputes arising from them.

Changes

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows when they last changed.

Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected]. How we handle your data is set out separately on the privacy page.