Anti-Scammer Alert

Help To Stop Scammers, Help For Victims

Helping people take charge of their lives

First, what is a scam?

The simplest explanation is that a scam is a presentation to a targeted victim by someone pretending to be someone other than he or she says, with the sole purpose of stealing money. It can be someone pretending to be a credit card company representative, or an agent of Social Security or Medicare, or a computer repair company, etc. For instance, it can be a phone call which announces "This is Jake from Discover." In social media, it can be someone in a Facebook page or other media that offers something, whether it is friendship or romance or financial advantage. Or just someone who says "Hi" or sends a message to you that appears to be destined to someone else, as in "Hello, professor, this is Jane, where is the quiz tonight?"

Being scammed is a traumatic experience. It is now estimated that one in three people in the U.S. have been scammed. Literally hundreds of millions of scams, hundreds of millions of people who have had money, their identity, and/or their emotional well-being, stolen from them, anywhere from $100 to a million dollars, sometimes their livelihood, sometimes their bank accounts or credit card accounts, sometimes their life savings, and sometimes their lives. Billions of dollars are lost each year. Some have been blackmailed. Some have received death threats. Some who have attempted to retrieve their lost money have been murdered. There have been many suicides; no one is keeping track of how many were the direct result of being scammed.

This is an issue of social justice. The primary victims of these scams are seniors and people of very modest income, and, as I will demonstrate below, the scammers are able to operate because of poor oversight by the government, law enforcement, and the media operators, who are more interested in the profits to be made in an unregulated network environment than protecting people from thieves.

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Important Note: If you have been scammed and you need help with recovery, reporting, or personal protection, or if you know or suspect that you or a friend are being scammed and need help, we urge you to go to our information, reporting, and consulting website: https://www.anti-scammer.net.

Copyright 2023-2024 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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