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
- 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
- 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.
D
- Deepfake
- Audio or video generated to imitate a specific real person, used to make an impersonation scam survive a phone or video call.
M
- Money mule
- A person whose bank account is used to receive and move criminal proceeds, whether knowingly, unwittingly, or under coercion.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
T
- Task scam
- A fake online job in which the worker completes trivial "tasks" and must deposit their own money to unlock earnings.
U
- Underreporting
- The gap between fraud that happens and fraud that gets reported. Every statistic on this site sits on the reported side of it.
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.