Scam Risk Score Calculator

Scams share a surprisingly small set of underlying tactics, even though the stories wrapped around them vary endlessly — a fake IRS agent, a romantic interest overseas, a tech-support pop-up, a job recruiter on Telegram. The FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) both track billions of dollars in reported losses each year, and when you look across their data, the same handful of pressure points show up again and again: urgency, authority, an unusual payment method, and a request for something that should never be shared.

The 10 questions in this calculator aren't arbitrary — each one maps to a tactic that shows up disproportionately often in confirmed scam reports. An unknown or unverified sender matters because legitimate organizations you already have a relationship with rarely need to reach out cold, and when they do, they don't ask you to act within minutes. Gift cards, wire transfers and cryptocurrency all share one property that makes them scammers' preferred payment methods: once sent, they're essentially impossible to claw back, unlike a credit card payment which can often be disputed.

Remote-access requests and one-time passcodes are especially dangerous because they don't just cost money directly — they hand over the keys. A scammer with remote access to your computer can see everything on your screen, including banking sessions you have open. An OTP shared over the phone can let someone log into an account protected by two-factor authentication as if they were you, because that's exactly the code the real login screen is asking for.

Urgency and threats work by design, not accident. Scam scripts are built to short-circuit the normal pause where you'd call a friend, sleep on it, or look something up — 'your account will be suspended in 30 minutes' or 'a warrant will be issued today' exists specifically to prevent that pause. Real government agencies and financial institutions overwhelmingly communicate first by mail for anything serious, and they never threaten immediate arrest over a phone call.

What this calculator can't do is replace judgment for situations outside these 10 patterns, or catch a scam sophisticated enough to avoid every single flag — a well-researched romance scam or a convincing fake job offer can take weeks to reveal red flags this checklist catches instantly once they appear. That's exactly why the site also has scam-specific calculators for job offers, romance, marketplace listings and investments — each digs into the tactics unique to that category in more depth than a 10-question general check can.

The single most protective habit isn't memorizing every tactic — it's building in a pause. Scammers are counting on you not taking one. If a message, call or offer trips even two or three of these flags, that pause is worth taking every time.