About Scam Examples

Scam Examples shows common scam texts, emails and calls, rebuilt from government alerts, so you can recognize one and know what to do next.

Who it's for

Anyone holding a message and wondering whether it's real, and anyone helping a parent, a friend or a colleague answer that question. No account, no tracking, nothing to install.

Who makes it

Scam Examples is made by Secria, which makes Secria Mail and Secria VPN. Secria makes an email service, so scam emails are close to our work. The examples and advice here don't recommend any product, including ours.

How the examples are made

• Every example starts from an official alert, from bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Reporting advice comes from official sources too, such as the UK's National Cyber Security Centre. We don't publish screenshots of unknown origin.
• We rebuild each message in plain text. Links use addresses reserved for examples (example.com, example.net, example.org), and phone numbers use 555-0100 to 555-0199, which are kept as non-working numbers, so nothing in an example reaches a real sender.
• We never reproduce a live scam link or phone number, even when an official alert prints one.
• Company and agency names appear only to say who scammers pretend to be. We don't use logos, and we aren't affiliated with any organization named.

How we check and date facts

Every number and every step cites its source, with the date we read it. A second pass re-opens each source from scratch before a page goes up. Scams change quickly, so we re-check the alerts behind each page every month and update the date when we do.

Corrections

Spotted something wrong or out of date, or a live link we missed? Tell us with a link to the source at secria.me/contact.