How to Report a Scam and Try to Recover Your Money

What to do in the first hour

The first hour belongs to whoever moved the money, not to a government agency. A bank, card issuer, payment app, gift card company, or crypto exchange is the only party that can sometimes freeze, recall, or reverse a payment, and that ability shrinks as time passes. The official reports come next, and they still matter.

1. Call the company that moved the money. Use the number on the back of your card, on your statement, or inside the app you already had, never a number the other person gave you. Say plainly that you were tricked into the payment and ask what can still be stopped.
2. Cut off any access the scammer still has. If you installed a screen sharing or remote access program, disconnect the device from the internet and remove the program. If you gave out a password, change it, and change it anywhere you reused it.
3. Write down what happened while it is fresh. Dates, amounts, phone numbers, account or wallet addresses, links, usernames, and screenshots. Every report that follows asks for the same facts.
4. Report to the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, the general federal intake for fraud reports.
5. Report to the FBI through the Internet Crime Complaint Center if any part of the scam happened online, by email, or by text message.
6. Put the dispute in writing. A phone call starts the clock, but a written record is what you will need if the first answer is no.

If you also handed over a Social Security number, a driver’s license number, or account logins, the money is only one of the problems. Treat that as a separate track and follow the steps in reporting identity theft, which has its own federal process and its own paperwork.

Why the order of the reports matters

Reports do different jobs, and only some of them can touch your money. The company that processed the payment may be able to act on the transaction itself. Federal agencies collect, analyze, and refer reports, but they are not a collection service for individual consumers.

Timing is not a formality. For an unauthorized electronic transfer from a bank account, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau explains that notifying the bank within two business days of learning about a lost or stolen card limits your liability to the lesser of the unauthorized amount or fifty dollars, that waiting longer can raise it to five hundred dollars, and that going past sixty days after the statement showing the transfer can leave you responsible for the full amount of the transfers that followed.

Wires work differently. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center runs a recovery team that can ask a receiving bank to hold funds that are still sitting in the account. Whether they are still sitting there is the part nobody can promise.

What recovery realistically looks like, by payment method

How the money left decides what can be done about it. Card payments carry the strongest consumer protections, bank transfers and gift cards have narrow windows, and cryptocurrency and cash have almost none. The Federal Trade Commission keeps a current list of the first call to make for each method.

Credit card

This is the best position to be in. The FTC’s instruction is to report it to the card issuer immediately and ask for your money back. Say the charge came out of a scam, and ask the issuer to block the merchant from charging again. Ask for the claim number and the decision in writing.

Debit card and bank account

Call the bank or credit union the same day. Debit pulls from money you already have, so a hold or a provisional credit is the difference between an inconvenience and a missed rent payment. The liability limits above depend on when you notify the bank, which is the practical reason not to wait until Monday.

Bank wire

A wire is built to be fast and hard to undo, which is why scammers ask for one. Ask your bank to send a recall request to the receiving bank immediately and file with IC3 the same day. What can come back is whatever has not already been moved out of the receiving account. The steps are in the guide to wire transfer scams.

Gift card

Call the number on the back of the card and tell the issuer the number was given to a scammer. The FTC’s guidance on gift card scams says to keep the card and the store receipt and photograph both, because the issuer will ask for them. Some issuers have frozen unspent balances. Whether anything is left often depends on minutes. What to say on that call is in gift card scams.

Payment app

Report it inside the app and to the bank or card behind the app the same day. An app transfer between two people is usually treated as a payment you authorized, which is a weaker position than a card dispute, so the wording matters: describe the deception clearly rather than calling it an error.

Cryptocurrency

The FTC states flatly that cryptocurrency payments typically are not reversible. Report to the exchange or ATM operator you used, and to IC3. Anyone who contacts you afterward offering to trace the coins for a fee is running a second scam. See cryptocurrency scams.

Check

Ask the bank whether the check can still be stopped, and ask separately what happens if a check you deposited comes back after the funds appeared available. Those are two different problems, and check fraud separates them.

Cash, by mail or by courier

If cash went out by mail, the FTC points to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service at 1-877-876-2455, which can sometimes intercept a package still in the system. If someone came to a door to collect cash, which is common in the grandparent scam, report it to local police too: that is a physical crime scene with a time and an address.

Where to report a scam and what each agency does with it

No single office handles every scam. The FTC is the general intake, the FBI handles the online side, and several agencies take reports only within their own subject. Filing with more than one is normal and expected.

Federal Trade Commission

File at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. The FTC feeds reports into the database federal, state, and local investigators use to find patterns and bring cases. It does not resolve individual complaints or return money to individual consumers.

FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center

File at ic3.gov. IC3 says complaints are analyzed and may be referred to federal, state, local, or international law enforcement for possible investigation, and that because of the volume it cannot respond directly to every submission. Its own site also states that IC3 does not work with any non law enforcement entity, such as law firms or crypto services, to recover lost funds.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

If the problem involves a bank, credit union, card issuer, credit report, debt collector, money transfer service, or loan servicer, file at the CFPB complaint page. The CFPB forwards it to the company, which generally responds within fifteen days, with a final answer in up to sixty days in some situations. This is the federal route that most often produces an actual answer from a company.

Your bank’s regulator

If a bank stops responding, national banks and federal savings associations fall under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency at HelpWithMyBank.gov, which runs a customer assistance line at 1-800-613-6743.

U.S. Postal Inspection Service

Anything that traveled through the mail, including fake checks, prize letters, and cash in a package, belongs at uspis.gov/report. Mail fraud is a federal crime with its own investigators.

Social Security and the IRS

Calls or letters from someone claiming to be Social Security go to the SSA Office of the Inspector General, which covers misuse of Social Security numbers and benefits as well as impersonation of the agency. For taxes, forward a phishing email to [email protected] and report an IRS impersonation call to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration at 800-366-4484, both listed on the IRS reporting page. The versions that appear around filing season are in tax scams.

Your state attorney general or consumer protection office

State offices can act against businesses operating in your state and sometimes mediate directly, which no federal agency does for individuals. The directory is at usa.gov/state-consumer.

Local police

File locally when there was a physical element, when an insurer or employer needs a report number, or when the loss is large. Ask for the report number before you hang up.

When the person targeted is an older adult

The Department of Justice runs the National Elder Fraud Hotline at 833-372-8311, Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. eastern time, described by the Office for Victims of Crime. Callers get a case manager who stays with the case. If a relative, caregiver, or agent under a power of attorney is involved, that is a different problem with a different route, covered in elder financial abuse.

Reporting changes with the type of scam

The FTC and IC3 take every kind of fraud report, but several scams have a second place to report that reaches someone who can actually act. It is worth the extra five minutes.

Scams that start with someone pretending to be an agency, a company, or a relative all share one shape, described in impostor scams, which points to the narrower versions: an unexpected refund that turns into a request for money back, a debt collector who will not send written validation, a delivery notice charging a small fee, a prize that costs money to collect, and a donation request that never reached a real organization.

Money pitches have their own regulators. Investment scams covers how to check a registration before money moves and where the complaint goes. A fake employer belongs with the FTC and with the job board that carried the listing, in job scams, and if a supposed job involved receiving and forwarding other people’s money, read money mule scams first, because that carries legal consequences even for someone who had no idea.

For purchases, the platform matters as much as the agency: a private sale belongs with the marketplace, in marketplace scams; a storefront that took money and vanished belongs with the card issuer first, in online shopping scams; an apartment that was never available to rent goes to the listing site and local police, in rental scams; and a payment made after scanning a sticker over a real code goes to the business whose code was replaced, in QR code scams. A relationship built online that ended in a money request has its own pattern, in romance scams.

What to have ready when you report

Every intake form asks for roughly the same facts, so gathering them once saves telling the story five times. Collect them before you start filling anything in.

• Dates and times of each contact and each payment.
• Amounts, and the exact method used for each one.
• The account, card, wire reference, transaction ID, or wallet address the money went to.
• Phone numbers, email addresses, usernames, and web addresses the other person used.
• Screenshots of messages, listings, profiles, and receipts, plus photos of both sides of any gift card and its store receipt.
• Any name, badge number, case number, or company the person claimed.
• Names and reference numbers from every call you made to a bank or company.

Keep the originals. Do not delete the messages, even the ones that are painful to look at. A report with a transaction ID gets a different level of attention than a report without one.

The scam that targets people who already lost money

Anyone who lost money to a scam should expect a second approach from someone offering to get it back for a fee. The FTC calls these refund and recovery scams and says outright that scammers buy lists of people who have already been scammed.

The offer arrives by phone, email, social media, or a comment under a post where someone described a loss. The caller may claim to be from a government agency, a consumer advocacy group, a law firm, a crypto tracing company, or the company that took the money in the first place. The fee gets a respectable name: a retainer fee, a processing fee, an administrative charge, a tax, a shipping and handling charge. The FTC’s rule is short. Never pay up front for a refund or for help getting one.

Two facts are worth keeping handy. Government agencies and legitimate organizations will never ask for money to help you get a refund, and they will not guarantee that you will get your money back. IC3 states on its own site that it does not work with any non law enforcement entity, including law firms and crypto services, to recover lost funds, so anyone claiming to be working with the FBI on your case is misrepresenting that relationship.

This is the same pattern as the loan fee, the grant fee, and the prize fee, described in advance-fee scams. If someone found you because you lost money, that is the reason to be more careful, not less.

What happens after you file, and what to do in the following weeks

Most reports do not produce a personal update. The FTC uses them to build cases and share patterns with law enforcement, IC3 says it cannot respond to every submission individually, and only the CFPB route reliably produces a written answer from a company. The silence is normal and does not mean the report was wasted.

What you can do meanwhile is close the doors that may still be open. If personal information was shared, consider a credit freeze at all three nationwide bureaus. The FTC explains that a credit freeze is free and blocks new credit accounts from being opened in your name while it is in place, that an initial fraud alert lasts one year and can be renewed, and that an extended alert lasts seven years. Check your own credit file rather than waiting to be told: the FTC notes that AnnualCreditReport.com is the only site authorized to fill the free reports federal law entitles you to, and that all three bureaus have permanently extended free weekly reports.

Then harden the accounts. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency keeps its advice to four actions: recognize and report phishing, use strong and unique passwords, turn on multifactor authentication, and install updates.

One honest limit. Some money never comes back, no matter how fast or how correctly it was reported. That is a fact about how certain payment systems are built, not a verdict on the person who was targeted. Scammers work at this full time, they rehearse, and they choose the moment.

Reporting a scam FAQ