About

isthatascam.com is a free, public catalog of common scams in the United States and India, plus a quick AI-assisted check. If you're worried something is a scam, type or speak what happened and we'll match it against patterns we know about — and tell you what to do next.

How it works

Every day, an automated routine reads public sources — the FTC's consumer alerts, the FBI's IC3 advisories, India's CyberCrime.gov.in and I4C bulletins, RBI Sachet, Google News, and Reddit's scam communities. It drafts updates as a pull request. A human reviews and merges before anything goes live on this site.

When you type a query into the search box, we run it against the catalog and use Cloudflare Workers AI (Llama 3.1 8B) to surface the closest match, identify red flags from what you described, and produce immediate-action steps. The AI's job is to route you to the right catalog entry, not to invent answers. We also fall back to a static catalog view if the AI service is unavailable or rate-limited.

Accuracy and limitations

Entries can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. Scam patterns evolve faster than we publish. The AI assistant can miss novel patterns, mis-categorize a situation, or misread the input. Treat any answer here as a starting point, not a verdict. Always verify with an authoritative source — your bank, the official agency listed in the entry, or a trusted person — before you act on it.

Every entry on the site cites the public sources that informed it. Click through to verify.

We describe patterns, not people

We name a specific company or individual only when an authoritative source (FTC, RBI, court filing, named news outlet, etc.) has already done so, and we link to that source. We describe attack patterns and impersonation tactics — "callers claiming to be from Microsoft," "messages pretending to be from FedEx" — not accusations against any specific real person or business.

If you believe we have misidentified or misrepresented anyone, or have included a real-world entity by mistake, please email us at report@isthatascam.com. We will review promptly.

No liability

This site is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranty of any kind. Information here is informational, not legal, financial, medical, or law-enforcement advice. We are not liable for any loss, damage, or harm — direct or indirect — arising from your use of, or reliance on, anything published here. If you have lost money or been threatened, contact your bank, your local police, and the official fraud reporting channel for your country.

SeraphSecure

For scams that involve installing remote-access software (AnyDesk, TeamViewer, Quick Support, fake antivirus, etc.), we recommend SeraphSecure to detect and remove what the scammer installed. We have no financial relationship with SeraphSecure, no affiliate arrangement, and no referral compensation. We recommend it because it's a free, focused tool built for this exact problem.

Report a missing scam or submit a correction

Email report@isthatascam.com with:

• A short description of the scam pattern.
• The country (US or India) where you encountered it.
• Any link to a news article, government advisory, or Reddit thread that documents it.

We do not promise to act on every report, but we read them all and use them to prioritize what the routine looks for the next day.

Maintained by

This is a personal project — built and maintained by a single person, run on Cloudflare's free tier, with help from Claude. The source is private; the catalog is public.