About & editorial policy
How Scams Work (Scam Atlas) explains, in plain English, how online and phone scams actually work, one page per scheme, with the mechanics, documented cases, red flags, and loss figures from official statistics.
Why this site exists
Most scam advice is a list of warnings: be careful, do not click, hang up. That advice fails because it does not tell you what the thing on the other end is doing. Scams are processes. They have stages, roles, scripts, and a business model. Once you can see the shape of the process, the moment where the stranger becomes an advisor, the moment where a real login page becomes a fake one, the moment where the money leaves a rail you can reverse and enters one you cannot, the whole thing becomes recognisable in a way that a checklist never makes it.
So each page here aims at the level a journalist or a fraud investigator would use: enough detail to recognise and interrupt the scheme, and nothing that helps somebody run one.
The sibling site
How Scams Work has a companion: Clean on Paper, which explains how money laundering works. The two halves fit together. Scams are where the dirty money is made; laundering is what happens to it next. Every scheme page here ends with a "where the money goes" section that hands you off to the matching technique on that site.
What gets published
- Every fact carries a source. Cases, dollar figures, statistics, arrests, and sentences come from court records, government and regulator publications (FTC, FBI IC3, DOJ, CAFC, RCMP, ACCC Scamwatch, Action Fraud, Europol and their equivalents), or established news organisations. Each page ends with a sources list, and each source carries the date it was accessed.
- Named people appear only from the public record. A person is named here only if they have been charged, convicted, or sanctioned in a public proceeding, or if they are a public figure who spoke on the record. Only the legal and biographical facts relevant to the case appear, never addresses, contact details, family details, or speculation about people who have not been charged. Charges are not convictions and are labelled as such.
- Victims are not named unless they chose to go public themselves in the source we cite, and even then only to the extent that source did.
- No operational detail. There are no scripts, no tooling, no spoofing instructions, and no evasion techniques on this site. Mechanics are described at the level of "this is the stage where the victim is asked to move money to a second account," not at the level of how to build the thing that asks.
- Geography is sourced, not stereotyped. Several scam types genuinely do run from identifiable places, and pretending otherwise makes the pages useless. Where this site says an operation runs from somewhere, it cites the report: UN, USIP, DOJ indictment, Europol assessment; that documents it, and it describes criminal enterprises, not nationalities or ethnicities.
How the numbers work
Every chart on this site says which dataset it came from, which year it covers, and when it was pulled. Almost all of them show reported losses, which are a floor and not a total: agencies on every continent estimate that only a minority of scams are ever reported. The methodology page explains where each dataset comes from, how currencies are converted, and what the figures can and cannot be used for.
Updates
Data is refreshed daily. Scheme and case pages carry a "last reviewed" date, and pages are re-checked in occasional passes rather than on a schedule: in October 2026, for instance, a pass over every case still marked as charged found that 18 of 33 had since been pleaded, sentenced, settled or otherwise moved, and those pages were updated. A page can therefore be out of date between passes. Daily briefs are written automatically by a local AI model, marked as auto-generated with human review pending, and constrained to link only to source material fetched that morning.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it should be fixed. Send the page URL, the specific sentence, and, if you have it, the source that contradicts it, via the contact page. Factual corrections are made promptly and the page's last-reviewed date is bumped. Substantive corrections are noted on the page itself. The address is [email protected].
If you are named on this site and your legal situation has changed, a charge dropped, a conviction overturned, a sentence completed, send the documentation and the page will be updated to reflect it.
Who makes it
How Scams Work is run and published by Alykhan, a real person, who also runs Clean on Paper. Alykhan chooses the topics, sets the rules and deploys the site, but the pages themselves are researched and drafted with AI, and no human reads each one before it goes live. There is no named journalist or expert author behind any page, and none is implied. How the site is made and checked explains what AI does here, how accuracy is checked, what the checks have found, and what is not checked. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any government agency, bank, or law-enforcement body, including any agency whose data it reproduces.