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The friend who’s already seen the scam
Not a government portal, not a security company, not a fear campaign. A place that explains what is actually happening and what to do about it, written the way you’d explain it to your younger sibling.
Why we exist
Most cyber safety advice fails on contact
There is no shortage of material about online fraud in India. There are government advisories, bank circulars, awareness weeks and posters in college corridors. Very little of it reaches a nineteen-year-old at the moment a message lands on their phone.
Some of it is written in a register nobody under forty reads. Some of it is pure fear — a list of terrible outcomes with no instructions attached. Most of it treats getting scammed as a character flaw, which guarantees that the people it happens to say nothing for three days and lose their chance to do anything about it.
We started this because the gap is not information. It is translation. Students know scams exist. What they do not have is a plain description of how a specific scam works, what it looks like on screen, and what to press next.
What we do
Three things, properly
01
Explain the scam, not the category
Every guide takes one specific scam and reconstructs it — the actual message, the actual screen, with the giveaways marked. Knowing that “phishing exists” protects nobody. Recognising the exact shape of a KYC message at 11pm does.
02
Give instructions, not warnings
Every page ends with what to do, in order, whether or not it has already happened. If you have lost money, the useful information is the four things to do in the next hour — not a paragraph about being vigilant.
03
Take the shame out of it
The single biggest reason money is never recovered is the delay between being scammed and telling someone. That delay is made of embarrassment. So we write as though getting caught is what it actually is — a predictable outcome of a well-run operation, not evidence that something is wrong with you.
How we work
Our editorial standards
We are asking you to trust us on things that involve your money and your safety. Here is what that trust is based on.
We do not invent statistics. If we cannot point to a real source for a number, we do not use a number.
Every scam example is a labelled reconstruction. None of the screens on this site are real screenshots, and every company name, phone number and UPI ID in them is fictional.
We point to official channels, not to ourselves. Reporting goes to 1930 and cybercrime.gov.in. We are not a substitute for either.
We correct things. Scams change, helplines change, procedures change. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did.
We do not sell anything, and we do not take money from security vendors. Nothing here is a soft advertisement for an antivirus product.
We never publish personal details. When readers send us their experience, we use the pattern and drop everything identifying.
Be clear about this
What we are not
We are not the police, a bank, a law firm or a government body, and we have no connection to any of them. We cannot investigate your case, contact a scammer, freeze an account or recover your money. Anyone who tells you they can do those things for a fee is running the second scam.
What we can do is make sure that when something reaches you, you recognise it — and that if it has already happened, you know exactly what to do in the next hour.
“Everyone should have someone who’s already made the mistake and can tell them what it looked like. That’s the whole idea.”
The Digital Big Brother