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How to Find Your Way Around Exposing Scams

The app opens on a wall of numbers, which is the least useful thing on it. Everything you actually came to do lives in five tabs and about six screens. This is where they are.

3 min readUpdated 5 steps

The five tabs, in the order you will need them

Home is a dashboard. The two large figures at the top are community totals — how many reports have been verified, and how much money has been reported lost — and they are there for scale, not for a decision you are about to make. The thing worth using on that screen is the Check Before You Pay bar underneath them.

Search is the same lookup with more control: it carries the platform picker, so you can tell it a handle belongs to Cash App rather than to Instagram before it looks. Report is where you file. Forum is where people talk about approaches that have not become reports yet. Profile is your own account and everything attached to it.

Checking something is free, and stays free

This is the part worth being unambiguous about, because most apps in this shape are not. Looking up whether an identifier has been reported costs nothing, on every plan, without a limit. You get the verdict, the risk score and the report count whether or not you have ever paid anything.

What the paid plans buy is depth — the evidence files behind a report, and a handful of analysis screens. They do not buy a different verdict. If the answer to 'has this been reported' is what you need, the free app answers it.

Where your own things live

Everything you have created hangs off the Profile tab rather than being scattered through the app.

My Reports lists what you have filed and the status of each one. My Evidence lists the files you have uploaded and where each stands with moderation — useful, because a file you have uploaded is not public until a moderator passes it. Saved holds anything you bookmarked. Alerts holds your watch keywords. Notification settings decide what reaches your phone.

The screens that are easy to miss

Several useful things are not on a tab at all.

The AI Detector takes a suspicious message and flags the patterns in it. The Recovery Center opens step-by-step checklists for card, bank transfer, PayPal, crypto and identity theft, and it remembers which steps you have ticked. The Verified Directory lists businesses whose identity the moderation team has confirmed. Learn More collects trending alerts, the most-reported entities and recent reports, so the home feed can stay short.

What a status on a report means

You will meet a status on almost every screen, and they are not interchangeable. A report is not published the moment it is filed: every one is reviewed first, and publication is never automatic.

Verified scam means a moderator reviewed the evidence and upheld it. Disputed means somebody named in the report has contested it and the record is being re-examined. Insufficient evidence means a moderator looked and wanted more before standing behind it. Reading the status is the difference between 'somebody said this' and 'somebody checked this'.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an account to check an identifier?
No. The lookup works without signing in. An account is needed to file a report, upload evidence, set alerts or post in the forum — mostly so that what you submit can be traced to a consistent author if it is later questioned.
Which parts of the app are paid?
Checking an identifier is free and unlimited on every plan. Paid plans cover the evidence files attached to reports and some analysis screens. What each plan includes is shown in the app before you buy.
Why does the home screen show totals instead of my own activity?
The figures at the top are community-wide. Your own reports, evidence, saved items and alerts are all under the Profile tab.

Related guides

The app

Check before you send money

Look up a website, phone number, payment account or crypto wallet against what the community has already reported.

Download Exposing Scams — free

Store links appear here as soon as the app is published in your region.