About Me

And why I built a site about scams.

Hello. My name is Steve Nickson and I built this site to help educate people about how to recognize scams, and hopefully avoid becoming a victim.

scams

The idea came about when a good friend asked for advice about how to try and recover money they lost to an auction scam.

The more I looked into it, the more I realized how sophisticated the operation was. It involved 5 steps from stealing identities on the auction site, purchasing a new domain name with stolen credit card details, opening a web hosting account with stolen credit card details, using an innocent person's checking account [a job seeker on Monster.com], and then setting up a fake auction to commit fraud.

The scammers needed all 5 steps to be in place before the scam worked, with the auctions only lasting a few days.

They also used fraudulent cashier's checks or fake escrow sites that they, or fellow scammers owned.

Without going into all the detail of how it worked, it was clearly a very effective system designed to commit fraud. When I asked around, few people seemed to be aware of it.

That was my impetus to build the site!

My goal was to create a website dedicated to helping people to stay safe and secure, both online and offline.

Building this website has been a truly rewarding experience as people have sent their stories of how they have avoided fraud, identity theft or scams, as a result of information they picked up from this site.

Thanks for taking the time to visit!

I hope you can learn something that will make your life a little safer.




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