Glossary
The words that turn up in enforcement documents, bank warnings and news coverage, defined in plain English, including the terms the operators use about themselves.
A
- Account takeover
- Fraud in which a criminal takes control of your real online bank, payroll or similar account, usually by talking you into handing over your login details and a one-time code.
- Advance fee
- A payment demanded before a promised benefit is released, a prize, an inheritance, a loan, a job, or your own money.
- Authorised push payment fraud
- Fraud in which the victim makes the payment themselves, having been deceived, as opposed to unauthorised fraud, where the criminal takes the money directly.
B
- Boiler room
- An outbound call-centre operation that uses high-pressure sales pitches to sell retail investors speculative or fraudulent investments. Modern ones also work through messaging apps and social media.
- Business email compromise
- Fraud that redirects a legitimate business payment by impersonating an executive, a supplier or a lawyer, usually from inside a compromised mailbox.
C
- Chargeback
- A card payment reversed by the issuer at the cardholder's request. It is the strongest consumer protection in retail payments, and it is exactly what fraud schemes are designed to avoid.
- Civil forfeiture
- A court action against property itself, rather than a person, to take assets derived from or used in a crime. No criminal conviction is required, but the government must prove the link to crime in court.
- Cooling-off rule
- An FTC rule giving buyers three business days to cancel certain sales made away from the seller's place of business, such as at home. It does not cover sales made entirely by mail or telephone.
- Credit freeze
- A free restriction on your credit file so that nobody, including you, can open a new credit account in your name until you lift it. In the US you place it with each of the three credit bureaus.
D
- Deepfake
- Audio or video generated to imitate a specific real person, used to make an impersonation scam survive a phone or video call.
F
- Fraud alert
- A free flag on your credit file telling lenders to check with you before opening new credit. An initial alert lasts one year. An extended alert lasts seven years and requires an identity theft report.
G
- Guardianship of property
- A court appointment of someone to manage money and property for a person the court has found cannot manage it alone. In many states the role is called a conservatorship.
H
- High-yield investment program
- An unregistered investment, usually promoted through a website, that promises incredible returns at little or no risk. The SEC says they are typically run by unlicensed individuals and are often frauds.
M
- Money mule
- A person whose bank account is used to receive and move criminal proceeds, whether knowingly, unwittingly, or under coercion.
N
- Notario fraud
- Immigration fraud in which a notary public presents as qualified to give immigration legal help. In the US a notary public is not an attorney and cannot represent you in immigration matters.
O
- One-time passcode
- A short code sent by text or generated by an app to confirm a login or payment. Reading one out to a caller hands over the account.
- OTC broker
- A trader who exchanges cryptocurrency for cash or bank funds off-exchange, privately, and often without the checks a regulated exchange would apply.
- Overpayment scam
- A scam in which someone pays you with a check for more than the agreed amount and asks you to send the difference on. The check is fake, and you owe your bank when it bounces.
P
- Pig butchering
- A long-con investment scam in which a stranger spends weeks or months building a relationship before introducing a fake trading platform.
- Ponzi scheme
- An investment fraud that pays earlier investors with money collected from newer ones. It needs a constant flow of new money and tends to collapse when recruiting slows or many investors cash out.
- Power of attorney
- A legal document that gives another person, the agent, authority to make decisions about your money or property. The agent is a fiduciary and must act in your interest, not their own.
- Pump and dump
- Fraudsters spread false or misleading information to inflate a stock's price, then sell their own shares at the high price, leaving other investors with losses when the price falls.
- Pyramid scheme
- A scheme in which participants pay for the right to sell a product and the right to earn rewards for recruiting others, with rewards unrelated to sales to ultimate users. It is unlawful, unlike a genuine multi-level marketing business.
Q
- Quishing
- Phishing using a QR code, which hides the destination URL behind an image that no security filter reads as a link.
R
- Recovery scam
- A follow-up fraud targeting people who have already lost money, offering to get it back for an up-front fee.
- Regulation E
- The US rule, issued by the CFPB, on consumer rights in electronic fund transfers. It limits what you can be made to pay for an unauthorised transfer, but only if you report it in time.
- Remission
- The Justice Department process by which victims of a crime can ask for money back from forfeited assets. The Department says it and its remission administrators never ask for payment.
- Remote access tool
- Software that lets someone else see and control your device. Legitimate in IT support; the core of tech support and refund scams.
- Rug pull
- A crypto fraud in which developers promote a project, take investors' money, then abandon it, often deleting the website and social accounts and leaving a worthless asset.
S
- Safe account scam
- A caller posing as your bank, the police or a fraud team persuades you to move your own money into a "safe" account they control.
- Sextortion
- A threat to publish intimate images or messages unless the victim pays, frequently where no such images exist.
- Shell company
- A registered company with no meaningful operations, used to hold a bank or payment-processing account, receive funds, or put a legitimate-looking name between an operation and the people it takes money from.
- SIM swap
- Taking over a victim's phone number by persuading or bribing a mobile carrier to move it to a SIM the attacker controls.
- Smishing
- Phishing delivered by text message, a delivery notice, a toll charge, a bank alert, designed to get you onto a fake login page.
- Social engineering
- Manipulating a person into doing something, sending money, sharing a code, granting access, rather than attacking a system.
- Spoofing
- Making a call, message or email appear to come from a number, name or domain that belongs to someone else.
- Structuring
- Breaking cash transactions into smaller sums, including amounts at or below $10,000, in order to avoid a bank's currency reporting. US rules prohibit it in itself.
- Sucker list
- A list of people who have already been scammed, with details of the scam and how much they paid. Scammers buy, sell and trade them, then contact the same people again, often offering help to get the money back.
- Synthetic identity fraud
- Fraud that combines pieces of personal information to fabricate a person or entity, rather than taking over one real person's identity. The Federal Reserve cites reports that it is the fastest-growing US financial crime.
T
- Task scam
- A fake online job in which the worker completes trivial "tasks" and must deposit their own money to unlock earnings.
- Tech support scam
- A scam in which fake pop-ups, phone calls or search ads lead you to a fake technician who asks for remote access to your computer, claims to find viruses and charges you to remove them.
- Telemarketing Sales Rule
- The FTC rule on telephone sales campaigns. It bans cash-to-cash transfers, cash reload and remotely created payment orders, and bars advance fees for credit repair, debt relief and some loan and recovery services.
U
- Unclaimed property
- Money or assets held by a bank or company with no contact from the owner for a set period, which by law are turned over to the state. Searching and claiming through official state programmes is free.
- Underreporting
- The gap between fraud that happens and fraud that gets reported. Every statistic on this site sits on the reported side of it.
V
- Voice cloning
- Using generative AI to produce audio that imitates a particular person's voice, so that a caller or voice message can pose as a relative, official or account holder.
W
- Wire recall
- A bank-to-bank request to reverse a wire transfer before the receiving bank releases the funds. It works only within a short window.