Editorial policy
How we write and check our guides
Our guides exist to help people avoid and recover from scams. Accuracy and clarity come before everything else.
Sources
We base guidance on official advice from police, national cyber security centres, consumer protection agencies and financial regulators, and on patterns we see in anonymous check data and reviewed community reports.
Every guide ends with the sources it was written from, linked, so you can read the original rather than take our word for it. Where a figure appears, it is attributed to the organisation that published it and dated, because fraud statistics go out of date within a year and an undated number is worse than no number.
We do not cite other scam-advice websites as sources. If a claim can only be traced to a blog repeating another blog, it does not go in.
What we publish and what we refuse to
We publish how a scam works, what it looks like, what to do if it reaches you, and where to report it. We do not publish:
- Anything that would help someone run a scam. No working templates, no live infrastructure, no instructions.
- Accusations against named companies or people. Our brand pages describe what a company itself says it will never ask for, sourced to that company’s own help pages. The fake is the subject, never the brand.
- Live scam links. Domains in examples are defanged so they cannot be clicked, and phone numbers are drawn from ranges reserved for examples.
- Fear for its own sake. Scare copy makes people freeze, and frozen people make worse decisions. We say what the risk is and what to do about it.
Examples
Example messages in our guides are illustrative composites of common real-world patterns. Links are disabled, and names and numbers are fictional or reserved for examples. Each one is labelled “Illustrative, links disabled” where it appears, so a specimen can never be mistaken for a real message somebody has received.
Writing and review
We write for a reading age of about 12, avoid jargon, and always include what to do next. The order matters: on a page someone reaches in a panic, the action comes before the explanation.
AI use, plainly. AI tools may help with research and drafting. Every page is read and edited by a person before it is published, and a person is accountable for what it says. We do not publish machine-written text unreviewed, and where an assessment on the site is generated automatically, such as an automated check result, it is labelled as such on the result itself rather than buried on this page.
Each guide shows the date it was last reviewed.
How often we revisit a page
Scam guides go stale in a specific way: the scam stays the same but the reporting route changes. A short code is retired, an agency merges, a bank moves its fraud line. We re-check the reporting details in every country guide on a rolling basis and correct them as soon as we find a change, and we treat a dead reporting number as a serious fault rather than a typo.
Independence
Advertisers and affiliate partners have no say in our content or verdicts. Paid recommendations are labelled, and free protections are listed first. No partner sees a page before it is published, and no commercial relationship has ever changed a checker result, because there is no step in producing one where it could.
Where a product we could earn from does not actually solve the problem, we say so. Our own protection page tells readers that a VPN does not stop scam texts, calls or fake websites, which is not a sentence written by anybody trying to maximise commission.
Corrections
Spotted something wrong or out of date? Email hello@tapsafely.com. We review corrections within five working days. A correction that affects what someone should do is applied the same day we confirm it, and the page carries its new review date.
Who is accountable
A.I.T. Multiverse Consulting Ltd publishes this site and is accountable for everything on it, including the mistakes. Contact routes are on the contact page.