Every day, ordinary people lose money to messages that felt almost right.
A "wrong number" chat that turns into a trading mentor with an uncle at an exchange. A prize that only needs a $45 processing fee. A parcel held at customs for a small redelivery charge. A job that pays $300 a day to like videos — withdrawals after you "recharge."
Global scam losses run past $1 trillion a year. The victims are not stupid. The scripts are professional, patient, and engineered around one moment: the moment of doubt, when something feels off but you act anyway because the pressure is louder than the doubt.
So I built a tool for exactly that moment.
ScamOrNot
👉 https://scamornot-app.netlify.app
Paste any suspicious message, link, or wallet address. You get back:
- A risk score out of 100
- Every red flag found, explained in plain English — not "pattern matched," but why it's a fraud signal
- What to do next, specific to the flags found
No sign-up. No account. And by design, the check runs entirely in your browser — what you paste is never uploaded or stored anywhere. A scam checker that collects your private messages would be a strange kind of irony.
One job, done well
I took the narrowest possible scope on purpose: not a security suite, not an AI platform — one job. Tell me if this thing is a scam.
Under the hood it's a pattern engine covering 15 fraud families:
- Seed-phrase and credential theft
- Advance-fee "pay to unlock" structures
- Crypto doubling giveaways
- Pig-butchering scripts (the friendly-stranger-to-trading-platform pipeline)
- Task-job scams, fake parcels, authority impersonation, romance-to-money pivots
- Plus structural link analysis: brand names on domains the brand doesn't own, punycode look-alikes, IP-address hosts, @-trick URLs, abused TLDs
Calibrated, not vibes
Before launch I tested it against the cases that matter — real scam scripts and, just as important, things that must not be flagged:
| Case | Score |
|---|---|
| Pig-butchering "mentor" pitch | 45 — High risk |
| Crypto doubling giveaway | 64 — High risk |
| Seed-phrase "wallet validation" | 66 — High risk |
| Fake PayPal login link | 50 — High risk |
| Advance-fee lottery prize | 62 — High risk |
| Parcel-held customs text | 70 — Almost certainly a scam |
| A normal team message | 0 |
| The real paypal.com | 0 |
| A genuine bank transaction SMS | 0 |
| A security article saying "never share your seed phrase" | 0 |
That last one needed a deliberate guard: safety education mentions the dangerous phrases while warning against them. Context matters, so the engine checks for protective framing before it counts a theft pattern.
Honest limits
ScamOrNot is a pattern checker, not an oracle. It says so on the page: a clean result means no strong patterns detected, never guaranteed safe. Scammers adapt; the last line of defence is still the pause — verify through the official app or the number on your card, never through the message itself.
Why free, and what's paid
The moment of doubt is exactly when help should cost nothing, so checks are free (3 a day). Pro is $9/month for unlimited checks — paid in USDC, because the people who need this most are often screening gig offers and deals in crypto-native spaces. Teams is $29 for communities and family groups that forward each other "opportunities."
It joins my other build, ProofReceipt (SHA-256 delivery receipts for freelancers) — both came out of the same conviction: small, verifiable tools that protect people at the exact moment money is about to move.
Try it on the next "opportunity" that lands in your DMs. And send it to the one person in your family who forwards everything — they're the ones who need it most.
— NenzyBrown, Dubai
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