About this site

isthisemailascam.com helps you check a link before you click, find the guide for a message or a call before you pay or call back, and explains the patterns behind common scams in plain words, so you can spot them yourself. Everything is free, and nothing needs an account.

Who publishes it

This is an independent website, published by SELC Enterprises, LLC, a company in the United States. It isn't part of any government agency, bank or company named on it, and none of them pays it to say anything. The site itself is paid for by ads shown through Google AdSense (see "Advertising and affiliate links" below); Google is also named on some pages, as the maker of services that scammers misuse, and the ads don't change what we say about it. We cite the FTC, the FBI and other official sources because their public alerts are the most reliable descriptions of how scams work; we have no other connection to them.

How the content is checked

• Every fact that can change (a figure, an agency's advice, how a company contacts people) comes from an official page or report that we opened and read, except a few on sites that refuse the automated requests we check with; each page's source list marks those “not opened.” Each page that states facts like these lists its sources at the bottom, with the dates we checked them.
• When we quote an agency, the words in quotation marks are copied exactly from its page.
• Example messages are written by us from the descriptions in official alerts. They use made-up names, leave out phone numbers, and use web addresses ending in .example, which can never lead anywhere.
• We describe patterns. We never say that a particular phone number, business or website is a scam.
• The link checker shows signs to weigh, and the guide search shows guides that may match; neither gives a verdict. No tool can tell you a message is safe.

What this site will never do

• Call, text or email you first.
• Ask you for money, passwords, codes, or your Social Security or account numbers.
• Offer to get back money you've lost.
• Ask you to forward a suspicious message to us.

If anyone contacts you first claiming to be from this site, it isn't us.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, please tell us at hello@isthisemailascam.com. We check the claim against the official source, fix the page, and update the "last checked" date on it.

Advertising and affiliate links

The site is paid for by advertising from Google AdSense. Google chooses the ads, not us. An ad on this site isn't our advice: never call a number, install a program or pay a “recovery” service because of an ad. If you ever see an ad here that looks like a scam, please tell us which page it was on, and we'll ask for that kind of ad to be blocked.

We also use Google Analytics to count visits to our pages. Our privacy policy explains what it records; it never receives anything you type into the link checker or the guide search.

If a page includes a link to a paid service, such as an identity-protection company, and you buy through that link, this site may earn a commission. It never changes what we recommend: the free government steps always come first, and you never need a paid service to recover from a scam.