What to Do if You Have Been Scammed

01Stop sending money

Before anything else. If there is an outstanding request — a release fee, a tax, a verification payment, a final step to unlock a withdrawal — that request is part of the same scam, and paying it will not change the outcome.

This is worth saying first because the largest losses usually are not the first payment. They accumulate through a sequence in which each payment is presented as the one that recovers the last.

02Contact your bank or payment provider now

Speed genuinely changes the outcome here, in a way it does not for most of the other steps. Contact whoever moved the money — your bank, your card issuer, the payment app — and use the word fraud, because it routes you differently.

• Say clearly what happened, when, how much, and to which account or handle. Have the transaction reference ready.
• Ask which process applies to your case: a recall, a chargeback, a purchase-protection claim, or a fraud investigation. Ask what the deadline for it is.
• Ask them to note the report even if they say nothing can be recovered, and get a reference number.
• If card details were exposed, ask for the card to be cancelled and reissued.
• If you moved money at someone's instruction while on a call, say so explicitly. That specific pattern is one banks assess separately.

Contact the receiving platform too — a payment app, a marketplace, a social network. They may be able to freeze an account, and it is usually the fastest way for the account to stop working on other people.

03Secure your accounts

If you entered credentials anywhere, read out a one-time code, or installed anything you were asked to install, treat access as compromised rather than uncertain.

• Change the password on the affected account, then on your email, which is what password resets flow through.
• Change anything that reused the same password, and stop reusing it.
• Turn on two-factor authentication where it is available.
• Remove any remote-access or “support” software you were asked to install, and if it had access to your banking, do the password changes from a different device.
• Check for changes made while they had access: forwarding rules on your email, new recipients, altered contact details, new devices or sessions signed in.

Email forwarding rules are the one most often missed, and the one that quietly keeps the access alive after every password has been changed.

04Preserve the evidence before it disappears

Accounts get deleted, handles get renamed and sites go offline, often within days. Ten minutes of screenshots now is the difference between a report that can be acted on and one that cannot.

• The exact identifiers: payment handle, wallet address, phone number, email address, domain, social profile URL. Copy the text as well as screenshotting it.
• The profile or listing itself, showing the display name and any join date.
• The full message thread, including the earliest messages, not only the part about money.
• Transaction confirmations, references and timestamps from your side.
• Any receipt, invoice or shipping notice you were sent.

05Report it

Reporting rarely recovers your own money, and it is worth doing anyway. Corroboration is what turns a single account into a documented pattern, and a pattern is what shows up when the next person checks.

• Your national fraud reporting body. In the United States that is the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov. In the United Kingdom it is Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk. Elsewhere, search for your country's official fraud or cybercrime reporting service.
• Your local police, where a report reference may be required by your bank or insurer.
• The platform where you were approached, and the payment provider that moved the money.
• Community reporting, so the identifiers are findable by somebody checking before they pay.

When you report, lead with the identifiers rather than the narrative. A handle, an address and a date are what another person's search can match; a description of how it felt, however accurate, is not searchable.

06Expect a second approach

People who have just lost money are the most valuable audience there is for a follow-on scam, and they are contacted deliberately. Your details may be sold, published in a list, or already known to the same operation.

• Recovery services offering to retrieve your funds for an upfront fee. Treat this as a scam by default, especially where it arrives unprompted.
• Someone claiming to be from your bank, calling about the fraud you just reported — with details of it, which is persuasive and proves nothing.
• A law-enforcement or regulator impersonation, requiring a payment to release seized funds.
• A class action or compensation scheme that needs a fee or your banking details to pay you out.

The general rule holds: no legitimate recovery process requires you to pay in advance, and no legitimate authority collects fees in gift cards or crypto.

07An honest word about recovery

Whether money comes back depends mostly on how it left. Card payments have the strongest route through chargeback rights. Purchase-protection claims on payment services have a real process with a deadline. Bank transfers depend on the funds still being in the receiving account, which is why hours matter. Gift cards and crypto are very rarely recovered.

So report it quickly and completely, ask your provider directly what applies to you, and be sceptical of anyone who offers certainty about the outcome — particularly for a fee.