How to Write a Scam Report That Actually Helps

01Lead with the identifiers

The single most useful thing in a report is the string somebody else will type into a search box. A handle, a wallet address, a domain, a phone number, an email address. Everything else is context around those.

Copy them as text rather than only screenshotting them, and copy them exactly — punctuation, capitalisation and all. A wallet address transcribed by eye with one character wrong matches nothing, and looks to a reader like a different address entirely.

02What counts as evidence

Submitted material is not automatically treated as verified evidence — that is what evidence strength on a profile is expressing. What moves a report from an assertion towards something reviewable is material that could be checked by someone who was not there.

• Transaction confirmations and references, with dates and amounts.
• The full message thread, including the earliest messages rather than only the part about money.
• The profile or listing as it appeared, showing the display name and any join date.
• Receipts, invoices or shipping notices you were sent.
• The exact wording of what you were asked to do, which is often what makes a pattern recognisable across reports.

Capture it early. Accounts are deleted, handles are renamed and sites go offline within days, and a report filed a week later frequently cannot show any of it.

03Say what happened, in order, briefly

A few sentences covering how they reached you, what they asked for, how you were asked to pay, and what happened after. Dates against each. That is enough for a moderator to assess and for another person to recognise their own situation in.

Length is not the same as usefulness. A long account of how it felt is completely understandable to write and very hard for anybody else to act on, and it tends to bury the four or five facts that carry the report.

04What to leave out

• Guesses about who is behind it. A name you have inferred, or an accusation against a person you suspect, is the fastest way to make a report unusable — and it is how somebody uninvolved ends up named.
• Other people's personal information, including anybody you think may also have been targeted.
• Your own sensitive details. A report does not need your full card number, your address or your identity documents, and it should not carry them.
• Anything you were told by the scammer as fact. Record it as what you were told, because it is evidence of the script rather than evidence of a person.

05Why a second report is worth more than a longer one

Independent reports are weighted more heavily than volume, because ten accounts of one incident are still one incident. Two unconnected people describing the same method and naming the same identifier is the strongest ordinary signal there is.

That is the real reason to file even when your own money is gone and you expect nothing back. It rarely recovers anything for you, and it is often what makes the record substantial enough to be found by the next person before they pay.