Anti-Scammer Alert

Help To Stop Scammers, Help For Victims

Helping people take charge of their lives

Scam Victim Recovery - Quick Reference

It is estimated that 1 in 3 adults in the U.S. have been scammed. For many, it is a severe traumatic event. This is a very short guide to recovery, an outline of the steps needed.

1. Report your scam. This is a crucial step, and it should be done as rapidly as possible. If it was a financial scam involving your bank account or other financial account, call your bank or financial institution as soon as possible. If it was a credit card or gift card purchase, call the bank or gift card customer service phone and report it as fraud. See the Reporting Your Scammer page on this website regarding other online reporting. Be sure to follow the steps about saving all records before filing reports. Please do not join any group that says they report scammers. The vast majority of them are run by scammers, intent on re-victimizing people.

2. As soon as practicable, find a counselor who specializes in trauma recovery. Don't underestimate the emotional harm that you have endured. It is most often a severe emotional trauma.

Romance scams in particular have the most severe emotional consequences.

There is wonderful book and online resource, by a trauma counselor named Cathy Wilson, LPC, ACS. Her book - The Emotional Impact of Being Scammed and How To Recover - is available on Amazon for $8.99.

3. Why me? Why did this happen? This is not your fault. This is not the time for recrimination or self-blame. You are human; you were vulnerable, and the scammers are professional thieves, their techniques honed and perfected over years. They operate in gangs or in some countries large commercial enterprises.

4. Acceptance that you have fallen for a scam is essential for recovery. Forgive yourself.

5. You are not alone. Tens of millions of people just in the U.S. have been scammed. Some have lost many thousands of dollars, some their life savings.

6. Please stop all contact with the scammer. Block them on all social media, but PLEASE follow the instructions in Reporting Your Scammer regarding getting copies of all correspondence, messages, etc., BEFORE you block them. If the scammer is still a Friend on Facebook or other media, then Unfriend, and then Block. Especially important: please do not contact the scammer to attempt to get your money back. Scammers are extremely dangerous, violent criminal psychopaths, not the nice people they have pretended to be. They threaten or even kill people who pursue them. This is not exaggeration or hyperbole.

7. If the scammer was impersonating someone, please do not attempt to find or contact that person, unless it is specifically to provide sympathy for them. People who have their identities stolen in this way are undoubtedly going through very difficult times themselves, and they generally don't need or want to hear from yet another victim.

8. Regarding fund recovery. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get your money back unless payment was done using a credit card, direct bank transfer, or Amazon (or other) gift card, in which case call your bank or Amazon (or other) as soon as possible and put in a fraud claim. Direct bank transfers can sometimes be reversed if the sending and receiving bank can agree that it was a fraudulent transaction, but often these attempts fail because the recipient account was just an intermediary account, just one step in a long chain of financial transactions by the scammer ("money laundering") to ensure that the money cannot be returned. Scammers often have one or more of their victims set up dummy bank accounts for these money transfers, the victim not knowing that they are getting entangled in banking fraud.

9. Important note: Funds recovery, if possible, is not mysterious, nor does it involve any sort of "hacking." Anyone online claiming to get your money back through "hacking" or any other sort of secretive or mysterious procedure is in fact a "fund return scammer." They often pose as "hackers" donning cloaks, masks, and/or displaying video screens full of obscure codes. There are literally thousands of these scammers online offering these fake services.  They actually know nothing about the actual procedures for funds recovery. They have no skills except the ability to convincingly lie about what they can do for victims who believe them. Many of them get new victims through fake "endorsements" - fake testimonials by themselves or other scammers telling stories about how successful they were at returning funds. They will just steal more of your money up front, and, if you give them bank or credit card credentials, they will empty your bank account or charge thousands on your credit card.

10. Find a scam victim self-help group. For any group you join, make sure the group is private, and has membership approval and individual screening procedures to prevent scammers from joining. If the group Admins or any group members offer fund recovery, or if the group has no membership questions, or the group does not have individual screening procedures, you can be certain that it is either run by scammers or there will be scammers in the group. Unfortunately most Facebook self-help groups today have this problem.

11. Avoid so-called “scam reporting” groups on Faebook. Most of them are actually run by fund return scammers. There are now literally hundreds of thousands of scammers, so it is really pointless to report or expose an individual scammer or gang, and can be actually be personally dangerous, as these people are often violent criminals.

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Copyright 2023-2026 Anti-Scammer Alliance, Boston, MA.

This website was created by Anti-Scammer Alliance in fall, 2023, We wish to remain anonymous at this time for reasons of personal safety. We are victims of scammers, and we made a commitment to spread this concise information so that others may avoid the emotional trauma that we have endured, and/or to help other victims in their recovery, to understand what has happened to them. We make no claims to know everything about scammers or all aspects of their criminal activity.

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