About Is This A Scam?

We built Is This A Scam?, an AI-powered scam detection service. Send us a suspicious text, email, voicemail, document, or QR code, and we'll send back a plain-language verdict with recommended next steps. Start a free trial and you get a walkthrough for your own phone and email app, so the first one is easy to send.

What we do

Before we judge anything, we do the legwork. We follow and scan the links, decode QR codes, read the text out of images and PDFs, transcribe voicemails, and check senders, phone numbers, and web addresses against professional threat data. Then our most capable AI weighs all that assembled evidence and reaches a verdict (SAFE, SUSPICIOUS, SCAM, or UNKNOWN), reasoning from verified facts rather than from what an AI happens to recall, and refusing to guess when the evidence is genuinely unclear.

Scams are built to make you feel something: fear that your account is locked, urgency to pay before a deadline, excitement about a prize. We give you the opposite: a calm, fact-based read. Our AI doesn't get scared, rushed, or tempted; it weighs who really sent the message, where the links really lead, and what the evidence actually shows, no matter how alarming the message was designed to feel.

We built this the way we did because we're cybersecurity experts, using the latest AI technology and a diverse set of high-quality data connectors to bring real context to every submission, not a chatbot answering off the top of its head. One subscription covers up to 6 email addresses, so you can add parents, a partner, or kids as members; each person forwards from their own address and gets their own verdict back.

We're always on. Email us in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning, or on a public holiday, and you'll still get an answer. No waiting for business hours or a callback.

What we don't do

Advice only. Not a recovery service. We help you decide whether something is safe before you act on it; we do not recover funds that have already been sent, negotiate with scammers, or act on your behalf. If money has already been sent, the first calls are your bank or card issuer, then reportfraud.ftc.gov, and for financial fraud ic3.gov.

When we're wrong

There is no perfect AI, just as there is no perfect human. Ours will sometimes be wrong: it can miss something real, or flag something harmless. We would rather say that plainly here than have you find it out at the worst possible moment.

So treat a verdict as a strong, evidence-backed opinion rather than a guarantee, and keep your own judgement in the loop. It's why we built the AI to answer UNKNOWN and stop when the evidence genuinely isn't clear, instead of producing a confident-sounding answer it can't support. A straight “we don't know” is worth more to you than a guess. It's also why every verdict shows its reasoning and the specific things we found, so you can weigh what it's based on instead of taking our word for it.

We take that seriously, and we expect to be held accountable for it. We're not going to hide behind “the AI decided”: we built it, we ship it, and the answer it gives you is ours. If a verdict looks wrong to you, tell us.

How our guides are written and reviewed

We ground our scam guides in the patterns our AI analysis surfaces across real submissions in aggregate, cross-referenced against publicly documented tactics and figures from the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), both linked inline wherever a guide cites a statistic. Worked examples in each guide are illustrative composites based on common patterns we see, not a verbatim reproduction of any individual's submission; we never publish anything a subscriber sends us. Each guide carries a "Last reviewed" date, and we revisit it as scam tactics change.

Why this exists

This service started with two parents. One of them gets the scam texts and voicemails; the other gets the scam emails; both of them get the printed mail, the invoices nobody ordered, and the QR codes on paper. Repeating “be careful, check the sender” never once helped in the moment a convincing message actually arrived, and no one person can be reachable every hour of every day. So the goal became a habit instead of a lecture: pause, and ask, backed by an answer specific to that one message, built on evidence rather than on guesswork, available at any hour, and never delivered with a hint of judgement. We wrote the whole story down: why we built this, and whether it was even possible.

Who's behind this

Is This A Scam? was founded by Jayme Johnston, a CISSP-certified technologist with more than 30 years in technology, spanning software development, product management, principal solution architect, sales engineering, quality assurance, and field CTO roles. He wrote up why he built it on our blog. He also founded FortifiedWall, a separate cybersecurity and technology consultancy. They are different companies; the person behind both is the same. That multi-disciplined background is why Is This A Scam? works the way it does: real threat-detection rigor, applied to the everyday texts, emails, voicemails, documents, and QR codes that land in front of you, not a bolted-on chatbot. To sign up, start a free trial. For support, questions, or feedback, use the contact form.